David Mcnally
Biographic Data
| ID | 3626772 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Mcnally |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcnally |
| SIGNATURE | MCNALLY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-6250-9148 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 147 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Slavery and Capitalism
The first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery. Karl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labor have fallen out of favor among historians, but David McNally injects new life into them. Slavery and Capitalism gives the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery—using colonial travel literature, planter records and diaries, and slave narratives—to support the provocative clai…
Marx on Colonization and Bonded Labor
The concluding chapter of Karl Marx’s Capital (volume 1) has received remarkably little scholarly commentary. This is especially surprising as Marx addresses there “the modern theory of colonization” developed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. But rather than systematically pursue the issue of colonialism, Marx investigates Wakefield’s theory in order to illuminate the processes of primitive accumulation (or “originary dispossession”) that gave birth t…
Alternatives
This article examines the dynamics of the 2020 US elections in counterpoint to the antiracist uprising in defense of Black lives earlier in the year. The complex mediations of race and class in the United States are centred in the analysis of the election campaign and its aftermath. Failure by the American Left to build an antiracist working-class movement, it is argued, could be disastrous in the face of a resurgent far-Right
Night Lights
Daniel Bensaïd’s meditations on utopia and revolution assume a materialist form in his grasp of the non-linear temporalities of value relations in capitalist society. The result is a dialectical understanding of time as irregular and prone to ruptural transformations. Bensaïd’s unique reflections in this area open up a ‘strategic sense of time’ as the space of revolutionary politics
The dialectics of unity and difference in the constitution of wage-labour
This article seeks to dialecticise the debate between the ostensible politics of class and those of identity. It mobilises the Hegelian-Marxian conception of 'unity of the diverse' against abstract conceptions of both universality and difference, in order to demonstrate how working classes are constituted in and through (i.e. internally related to) multiple social differences. In contrast to bad essentialism, the dialectical-Marxist concept of wo…
The Blood of the Commonwealth
Insisting on the status of money as a creature of both the market and the state, this article challenges dualistic understandings of capitalist imperialism as entailing two fundamentally distinct logics, one capitalist, the other territorial. In opposition to the dual-logics position, the article argues for the distinctiveness of capitalist money in terms of a complex but unitary socio-economic logic. The social dynamism of this logic involves th…
From Fetishism to ‘Shocked Disbelief ’
The recent arrival of From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics by Fine and Milonakis is especially propitious given the context of the Great Recession of 2008 – and the associated decline of public faith in the verities of mainstream economics. Fine and Milonakis provide a magisterial critical survey of contemporary economics and demonstrate the need for a ‘new and truly interdisciplinary political economy’ capable of ‘incorporating the social …
Monsters of the Market
Winner of the 2012 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of mo…
From Financial Crisis to World-Slump
This paper assesses the current world economic crisis in terms of crucial transformations in global capitalism throughout the neoliberal period. It argues that intense social and spatial restructuring after the crises of 1973–82 produced a new wave of capitalist expansion (centred on East Asia) that began to exhaust itself in the late-1990s. Since that time, new problems of overaccumulation and declining profitability have plagued global capitali…
Language, Praxis and Dialectics
The Dual Form of Labour in Capitalist Society and the Struggle over Meaning
A Tribute to Neal Wood
Frances Abele, George Comninel, and David McNally have written about life of Neal Wood who founded Graduate Program of Social and Political Thought at York University and influenced generations of scholars with his commitment to socialism and his intellectual rigour. Wood applied a social-historical approach to study of political thought, especially study of liberalism, acknowledging its achievements while probing its limitations, particularly it…
Another World Is Possible
Turbulence in the World Economy
Two years ago, the tectonic plates of the world economy shifted. Within a matter of months, the crisis in Thailand had engulfed East Asia. Global financial markets were rocked a year later when Russia defaulted on forty billion dollars in foreign loans. Just as markets were starting to shrug that one off, economic panic hit Brazil this January, sending stock markets crashing and knocking down the country's currency, the real, more than 40 percent…
The Present as History
Talk of a "new economy" is all the rage these days. A dynamic global market economy that has no precedents is said to be propelling the world into a new millennium of abundance. In their 1998 special double issue on "the 21st Century Economy," for instance, the editors of Business Week predicted that "Revolutionary technology and rapid globalization...will send productivity soaring, allowing faster growth with low inflation and modest unemploymen…
Globalization on Trial
What a difference a year makes. As recently as last summer, economic pundits and global investors were singing the praises of the "Asian tigers." The World Bank basked in the glow of its 1993 report, The Asian Miracle. Throughout ruling circles, the "Asian model" was touted as proof that open markets and the free flow of capital would be the salvation of humankind.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent art…
Against the Market
Deregulation or Better Regulation? Issues for the Public Sector
Language, History, and Class Struggle
Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. - Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German IdeologyThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The Challenge of Restructuring
Once More on Labour, Nationalism and Free Trade
McNally argues that there are major flaws in the nationalist politics dominating the Left in English Canada which succeed in dividing the working class movement at a critical time and divert attention from the real issues
Beyond Nationalism, Beyond Protectionism
This article advances a theoretical and political critique of the protectionist opposition of Canada's labour movement to the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States. North American free trade is examined in the context of the global trend towards regional trade blocs. The author suggests that nationalist politics have seriously divided English-speaking and Quebec workers in Canada, and makes the case for an alternative politics…
Socialism or Protectionism
These are odd times for the Canadian Left. The debate in recent years over the Mulroney government's trade agreement with the United States appears to have redefined the very terrain of socialist politics. In response to the trade deal, many former left-wing critics of social democracy adopted a position decidedly to the right of the NDP during the recent federal election. They did so by calling for support for the Liberal Party in those ridings …
Political Economy without the Working Class
Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism
From the Introduction: This book challenges the conventional wisdom about classical political economy and the rise of capitalism. It is written in the conviction that modern interpretations of political economy have suffered terribly from acceptance of the prevailing liberal view of the origins and development of capitalist society. By the liberal account, capitalism emerged out of the centuries-old competitive activities of merchants and manufac…
Another World Is Possible
From Financial Crisis to World-Slump
This paper assesses the current world economic crisis in terms of crucial transformations in global capitalism throughout the neoliberal period. It argues that intense social and spatial restructuring after the crises of 1973–82 produced a new wave of capitalist expansion (centred on East Asia) that began to exhaust itself in the late-1990s. Since that time, new problems of overaccumulation and declining profitability have plagued global capitali…
The dialectics of unity and difference in the constitution of wage-labour
This article seeks to dialecticise the debate between the ostensible politics of class and those of identity. It mobilises the Hegelian-Marxian conception of 'unity of the diverse' against abstract conceptions of both universality and difference, in order to demonstrate how working classes are constituted in and through (i.e. internally related to) multiple social differences. In contrast to bad essentialism, the dialectical-Marxist concept of wo…
Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism
Over the course of the past decade the writings of Harold Adams Innis have served as a source of intellectual inspiration to scholars attempting to develop a critical political economy of Canada. During this decade of analysis and investigation, it has been suggested continually that Innis' work forms the indispensable basis for a Marxian analysis of the Canadian economy
The Dual Form of Labour in Capitalist Society and the Struggle over Meaning
Against the Market
Globalization on Trial
What a difference a year makes. As recently as last summer, economic pundits and global investors were singing the praises of the "Asian tigers." The World Bank basked in the glow of its 1993 report, The Asian Miracle. Throughout ruling circles, the "Asian model" was touted as proof that open markets and the free flow of capital would be the salvation of humankind.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent art…
The Blood of the Commonwealth
Insisting on the status of money as a creature of both the market and the state, this article challenges dualistic understandings of capitalist imperialism as entailing two fundamentally distinct logics, one capitalist, the other territorial. In opposition to the dual-logics position, the article argues for the distinctiveness of capitalist money in terms of a complex but unitary socio-economic logic. The social dynamism of this logic involves th…
Beyond Nationalism, Beyond Protectionism
This article advances a theoretical and political critique of the protectionist opposition of Canada's labour movement to the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States. North American free trade is examined in the context of the global trend towards regional trade blocs. The author suggests that nationalist politics have seriously divided English-speaking and Quebec workers in Canada, and makes the case for an alternative politics…
Language, History, and Class Struggle
Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. - Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German IdeologyThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The Challenge of Restructuring
Socialism or Protectionism
These are odd times for the Canadian Left. The debate in recent years over the Mulroney government's trade agreement with the United States appears to have redefined the very terrain of socialist politics. In response to the trade deal, many former left-wing critics of social democracy adopted a position decidedly to the right of the NDP during the recent federal election. They did so by calling for support for the Liberal Party in those ridings …
Technological Determinism and Canadian Political Economy
The staple thesis of Harold Innis remains central to the new Canadian political economy. Since the publication of my article Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism: Marx, Innis and Canadian Political Economy (SPE 6, 1981), at least five spirited defences of the Left-Innisian perspective have appeared in print.' Yet it must be said that these articles, for the most part, fail to engage seriously with the issues I raised
The Present as History
Talk of a "new economy" is all the rage these days. A dynamic global market economy that has no precedents is said to be propelling the world into a new millennium of abundance. In their 1998 special double issue on "the 21st Century Economy," for instance, the editors of Business Week predicted that "Revolutionary technology and rapid globalization...will send productivity soaring, allowing faster growth with low inflation and modest unemploymen…
Political Economy without the Working Class
Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism
Over the course of the past decade the writings of Harold Adams Innis have served as a source of intellectual inspiration to scholars attempting to develop a critical political economy of Canada. During this decade of analysis and investigation, it has been suggested continually that Innis' work forms the indispensable basis for a Marxian analysis of the Canadian economy
Rereading Capital
Technological Determinism and Canadian Political Economy
The staple thesis of Harold Innis remains central to the new Canadian political economy. Since the publication of my article Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism: Marx, Innis and Canadian Political Economy (SPE 6, 1981), at least five spirited defences of the Left-Innisian perspective have appeared in print.' Yet it must be said that these articles, for the most part, fail to engage seriously with the issues I raised
Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism
From the Introduction: This book challenges the conventional wisdom about classical political economy and the rise of capitalism. It is written in the conviction that modern interpretations of political economy have suffered terribly from acceptance of the prevailing liberal view of the origins and development of capitalist society. By the liberal account, capitalism emerged out of the centuries-old competitive activities of merchants and manufac…
Socialism or Protectionism
These are odd times for the Canadian Left. The debate in recent years over the Mulroney government's trade agreement with the United States appears to have redefined the very terrain of socialist politics. In response to the trade deal, many former left-wing critics of social democracy adopted a position decidedly to the right of the NDP during the recent federal election. They did so by calling for support for the Liberal Party in those ridings …
Political Economy without the Working Class
Beyond Nationalism, Beyond Protectionism
This article advances a theoretical and political critique of the protectionist opposition of Canada's labour movement to the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States. North American free trade is examined in the context of the global trend towards regional trade blocs. The author suggests that nationalist politics have seriously divided English-speaking and Quebec workers in Canada, and makes the case for an alternative politics…
Once More on Labour, Nationalism and Free Trade
McNally argues that there are major flaws in the nationalist politics dominating the Left in English Canada which succeed in dividing the working class movement at a critical time and divert attention from the real issues
Language, History, and Class Struggle
Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. - Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German IdeologyThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The Challenge of Restructuring
Against the Market
Deregulation or Better Regulation? Issues for the Public Sector
Globalization on Trial
What a difference a year makes. As recently as last summer, economic pundits and global investors were singing the praises of the "Asian tigers." The World Bank basked in the glow of its 1993 report, The Asian Miracle. Throughout ruling circles, the "Asian model" was touted as proof that open markets and the free flow of capital would be the salvation of humankind.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent art…
Turbulence in the World Economy
Two years ago, the tectonic plates of the world economy shifted. Within a matter of months, the crisis in Thailand had engulfed East Asia. Global financial markets were rocked a year later when Russia defaulted on forty billion dollars in foreign loans. Just as markets were starting to shrug that one off, economic panic hit Brazil this January, sending stock markets crashing and knocking down the country's currency, the real, more than 40 percent…
The Present as History
Talk of a "new economy" is all the rage these days. A dynamic global market economy that has no precedents is said to be propelling the world into a new millennium of abundance. In their 1998 special double issue on "the 21st Century Economy," for instance, the editors of Business Week predicted that "Revolutionary technology and rapid globalization...will send productivity soaring, allowing faster growth with low inflation and modest unemploymen…
Another World Is Possible
Language, Praxis and Dialectics
The Dual Form of Labour in Capitalist Society and the Struggle over Meaning
A Tribute to Neal Wood
Frances Abele, George Comninel, and David McNally have written about life of Neal Wood who founded Graduate Program of Social and Political Thought at York University and influenced generations of scholars with his commitment to socialism and his intellectual rigour. Wood applied a social-historical approach to study of political thought, especially study of liberalism, acknowledging its achievements while probing its limitations, particularly it…
From Financial Crisis to World-Slump
This paper assesses the current world economic crisis in terms of crucial transformations in global capitalism throughout the neoliberal period. It argues that intense social and spatial restructuring after the crises of 1973–82 produced a new wave of capitalist expansion (centred on East Asia) that began to exhaust itself in the late-1990s. Since that time, new problems of overaccumulation and declining profitability have plagued global capitali…
Monsters of the Market
Winner of the 2012 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of mo…
From Fetishism to ‘Shocked Disbelief ’
The recent arrival of From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics by Fine and Milonakis is especially propitious given the context of the Great Recession of 2008 – and the associated decline of public faith in the verities of mainstream economics. Fine and Milonakis provide a magisterial critical survey of contemporary economics and demonstrate the need for a ‘new and truly interdisciplinary political economy’ capable of ‘incorporating the social …
The Blood of the Commonwealth
Insisting on the status of money as a creature of both the market and the state, this article challenges dualistic understandings of capitalist imperialism as entailing two fundamentally distinct logics, one capitalist, the other territorial. In opposition to the dual-logics position, the article argues for the distinctiveness of capitalist money in terms of a complex but unitary socio-economic logic. The social dynamism of this logic involves th…
The dialectics of unity and difference in the constitution of wage-labour
This article seeks to dialecticise the debate between the ostensible politics of class and those of identity. It mobilises the Hegelian-Marxian conception of 'unity of the diverse' against abstract conceptions of both universality and difference, in order to demonstrate how working classes are constituted in and through (i.e. internally related to) multiple social differences. In contrast to bad essentialism, the dialectical-Marxist concept of wo…
Night Lights
Daniel Bensaïd’s meditations on utopia and revolution assume a materialist form in his grasp of the non-linear temporalities of value relations in capitalist society. The result is a dialectical understanding of time as irregular and prone to ruptural transformations. Bensaïd’s unique reflections in this area open up a ‘strategic sense of time’ as the space of revolutionary politics
Political science (23 works) · Economics (21 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (16 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Economy (10 works) · Market economy (10 works) · Law (9 works)