Martin Thomas and Dick Bryan, ‘Crisis and sequels: capitalism and the new economic turmoil since 2007’

2017 Political Economy Seminar Series

Martin Thomas and Dick Bryan, ‘Crisis and sequels: capitalism and the new economic turmoil since 2007’

Date: Wednesday 30 August

Time: 12:00-2:00pm

Location: Abercrombie Business School room 2130, University of Sydney

Abstract: Like every crisis, 2008’s surprised.

By collating a series of discussions, conducted with a variety of left-wing economists in real time, as the crisis and its aftershocks evolved, Martin Thomas’s forthcoming book Crisis and Sequels: capitalism and the new economic turmoil since 2007 (Brill) tries to learn from the surprise, and not to dissolve it in a scheme of ineluctable generalities.

The book also wonders what shape of capitalism would emerge from the crash. Frequently in the history of capitalism, economic crises have broken the inertia of bourgeois wisdom and triggered political shifts or conflicts. As of 2016, when the discussions collated in the book were completed, the evidence was that neoliberalism had proved eerily resilient.

So it has: and we need to understand why. We need also to understand its developing fragilities, and the possible scope of attempts such as Trump’s to stretch neo-liberalism to the point of disrupting it from the right.

The interviewed political economists include Fred Moseley, Costas Lapavitsas, Leo Panitch, Simon Mohun, Trevor Evans, Dick Bryan, Michel Husson, Andrew Kliman, Robert Brenner, Barry Finger, Daniela Gabor, Hugo Radice, Andrew Gamble, Alfredo Saad Filho.

Emeritus Professor Dick Bryan will be joining Martin Thomas to discuss the book of which he says “Martin created a really interesting project. It will be illuminating to watch people’s views change (or not) and a great stimulus to see why (or whether) debates within Marxism matter in framing conjunctural analysis.”

About the speaker: Martin Thomas is a long-time writer for the socialist publications Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty, based in London, and author of Gramsci in Context (2014).