Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence Verso, 2006

 

 

 

There is a great deal of debate within the Marxist left about whether the economic crisis is the result of the long-term ill health of the so-called "real economy" or if the system crashed out of its inherent volatility. Noted historian Robert Brenner argues that it has roots in an extended period of stagnation, which he elucidated in a talk at the Berkeley Sociology Colloquium titled "Prosperity and Crisis in the World Economy: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow."

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Turbulence

Turbulence Collective, What Would It Mean To Win? PM Press, 2010

John Gabriel Borkman at Aurora Theatre

The capitalist order faces multiple crises, including what Tadzio Mueller calls a bio-crisis. When capitalists say they're going green, what challenge, if any, does that present to the status quo? Mueller provides an analysis grounded in neoliberalism's history. And Karen Lewis discusses Henrik Ibsen's pointed indictment of capitalist greed.

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy Picador, 2010

What relation does the price of an item have to its actual worth -- an especially pertinent question in the middle of ecological crisis and as the economic meltdown massively devalues assets from stocks to houses? Radical academic Raj Patel believes much can be learned from thinkers like Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, and even Adam Smith about value, price, and the market.

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Nancy Fraser, "Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History" New Left Review

Second wave feminism arguably changed the lives of Americans more than any other movement of the New Left. Yet did it have the unintended consequence of bolstering a new form of capitalism taking shape? Noted feminist critic Nancy Fraser discusses the simultaneous rise of the women's movement and neoliberalism and argues for a renewed feminism today.

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Jason W. Moore, "Ecological Crises and the Agrarian Question in World-Historical Perspective" Monthly Review (Nov. 2008)

It's become a truism on the left that we are facing a twin crisis of capitalism and the environment. But what is the nature of those crises or -- as historian and political economist Jason W. Moore sees it -- crisis? What does the long view, historically speaking, tell us about the crisis today? And what are the implications for the Left of seeing the social-economic and the ecological as constitutive of each other?

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Peter Gowan, "Triumphing toward International Disaster: The Impasse in American Grand Strategy" Critical Asian Studies

Peter Gowan, "Crisis in the Heartland" New Left Review

Peter Gowan, a major intellectual force on the Left, died on June 12. Several months ago on ATG, Gowan talked about the postwar internationalist capitalist order fashioned by the US. That order, Gowan argued, has been in crisis for many years. What happened to US primacy, and why? In what ways has the US tried to restore its hegemony, and what obstacles has it encountered? Gowan talked about the evolving relationships among advanced capitalist nations.