Dr. Michael Hudson is a prominent US critical economist and President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Dr. Hudson acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide including Iceland, Latvia and China on finance and tax law. He is also the author of J is for Junk Economics (2017), Killing the Host (2015), The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971), amongst many others.

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Dr. Utsa Patnaik is a Marxist economist. Graduating from the Oxford University, she she served at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi as a Professor from 1973 until 2010.

Dr. Patnaik’s main areas of research interest are the problems of transition from agriculture and peasant predominant societies to industrial society, both in a historical context and at present in relation to India; and questions relating to food security and poverty. She has authored several books, including Peasant Class Differentiation – A Study in Method (1987), The Long Transition (1999) and The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (2007) and, most recently A Theory of Imperialism (2016, with Prabhat Patnaik)

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Dr. Enfu Cheng is a member of the Presidium of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Academic Divisions, the Director of the Academic Division of Marxist Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and a member of the National People’s Congress.

Dr. Cheng’s main areas of research interest are the economic reform and development of China, theoretical economics, and Political economy. He published over 400 Journal articles on People’s Daily, Social Sciences In China Press (SSCP), Economics Perspectives, and many other prestigious Chinese Journals. Dr. Cheng has also authored The three stages of Socialism (1990), Comments on Western theories of property rights (1997), Economic system under Socialism with Chinese characteristics (2012), and amongst many others.

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Dr. Maria Páez Victor is a sociologist, a former member-at-large of the Law Commission of Ontario (LCO) Board of Governor, and is currently on the Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee of Ontario. She was also teaching the sociology of health and medicine as well as health and environmental policies at the University of Toronto, and an active member of the Latin American community in Canada.

Dr. Páez Victor was born in Venezuela and educated in Caracas, New York, Mexico City, England and Canada. She has twenty years national and international experience in policy analysis and environmental assessment, with expertise in the areas of health, environment, and energy.

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David is the author of five books in Marxist economics, political economy and social theory, the latest being Passion and Patience: Society, History and Revolutionary Vision (International Publishers, 2015).  Dr. Laibman is also the long-time Editor of Science & Society, a Marxist quarterly journal now entering its 84th year of publication.  [He is also a ragtime guitarist; his performance-interviews double DVD set, The Guitar Artistry of David Laibman, is available from Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop.]

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Bryan D. Palmer, a former Canada Research Chair (2001-2015), editor of the journal Labour/Le Travail (1997-2014), Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Emeritus Professor, Trent University, Peterborough Canada, is the author or editor of over 20 volumes on labour, the left, and the theory and historiography of historical materialism. His writings have been widely translated from English into Turkish, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Korean, and other languages, and he has taught and lectured in China, Brazil, and Russia as well as in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.

A number of his essays were brought together in a two-volume Historical Materialism Book series publication (Brill, 2015/Haymarket, 2017), Marxism and Historical Practice.  Among his award-winning books are James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (2007) and the co-authored Toronto’s Poor: A Rebellious History (2016).  In 2020 Brill will publish his James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938.

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