Leo Panitch, 'Whose Crisis? Capital, Labour and the State Today'

The annual E.L. ‘Ted’ Wheelwright Memorial Lecture is held to commemorate the pioneering role that Ted Wheelwright (pictured in set image) played in developing studies in Political Economy in Australia at the University of Sydney. Previous Wheelwright Lectures have been given by Walden Bello (2008), Jim Stanford (2009), Fred Block (2010), Sheila Dow (2011), Diane Elson (2012), and Susan George (2013).

In 2014 the 7th Annual Wheelwright Lecture was given by Leo Panitch on ‘Whose Crisis? Capital, Labour and the State Today’. A version of Leo’s lecture has recently been published in the Journal of Australian Political Economy and is now available HERE in Issue No. 74 (2014) and a video podcast is also available HERE.

Of course, most recently Leo Panitch has co-authored with Sam Gindin The Making of Global Capitalism that has rightly been heralded as a groundbreaking assessment of American empire in shaping global capitalism. In their now classic phrase, Panitch and Gindin trace how the American state came to superintend capitalism on a worldwide scale in order to deliver a truly accessible and popular account of the political economy of the American state as the ultimate guarantor of capitalist interests globally throughout the twentieth century. In 2013, The Making of Global Capitalism was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize. Since then, Sam Gindin has provided analysis of ‘Unmaking Global Capitalism’ in Jacobin Magazine and here, in the 2014 Wheelwright Lecture, Leo Panitch launches into an up-to-date assessment of the crisis of global capitalism and its implications for labour and the state.

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Leo Panitch, ‘Whose Crisis? Capital, Labour and the State Today’