Neoliberalism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism?
Contemporary radical political economy presents its students with a paradox. Our objects of study have often been defined in terms of the “new”: the New Liberalism (and Conservatism), New Labour, the New Economy, and the New Imperialism, for example. On the other hand, radical scholarship has regularly attempted to make sense of the contemporary world by means of concepts reminiscent of critiques of capitalism from a century ago and more: primitive accumulation (or “accumulation by dispossession”), finance or “rentier” capitalism, enclosure and the commons, to name just a few blasts from the past. Is neoliberalism the “highest stage of capitalism” or has the old become new again?
The Great Lakes conference invites submissions that both reflect and interrogate these and other continuities and discontinuities in approach and substantive concern within the radical political economy tradition. The following themes may serve to orient contributions:
-Work, Wages and Welfare in the “New” Capitalism
-New and Old Challenges for Labour
-Patriarchy as Panacea? Gender, Privatization, and Social Reproduction
-Finance Capital, Accumulation, and the State
-Empire, empire, or Imperialism?
-Occupation and State-Building: Colonial Redux?
-Resources and Ecology: Malthusian Constraint?
-Primitive Accumulation, Dispossession and the “Commons”
-Is Another World Possible? Contemporary Struggles Against Neoliberal Capitalism
NOTE: The 2008 Great Lakes conference will be held in conjunction with the first-ever North American Historical Materialism conference.
