Samuel Knafo is a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex. His main work addresses the capitalist transformation of finance, assessing the ways in which the rise of capitalist social relations in England transformed the nature of finance. He also works on various issues in Marxist theory including the question of alienation and its relationship to value theory. His publications include: 'The Fetishizing Subject of Marx's Capital', Capital & Class, 76 (2002): 145-175, and 'The Gold Standard and the Origins of the Modern International System', Review of International Political Economy, 13 (1) (2006): 78-102.

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde (Verso, 2002) and Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion 2005). In addition to her editing work for Historical Materialism, she is in the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and one of the editors of Revolutionary History. She co-organises a regular seminar in London called ‘Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture’.
Together with Ben Watson she runs the website http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk

Matteo Mandarini is currently Visiting Fellow to the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy and the University of Leicester. His research focuses on the relations between ontology, time, and communism. He has written articles on the question of time in Karl Marx and Gilles Deleuze, on Antonio Negri, and on left-Heideggerianism and communism. He is currently working on a monograph on the philosophy of Negri (Pluto Press forthcoming). He is the translator of Time for Revolution, Negri (Continuum 2003); The Political Descartes, Negri (with Alberto Toscano, Verso 2007); The Labor of Job, Negri (Duke University Press 2007); and The Passage West, Giacomo Marramao (Verso 2007). He has also translated essays by Negri, Sandro Mezzadra, and Paolo Virno.