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You are here: The Platypus Affiliated Society/Archive for tag political economy

OWS has put the focus on finance capital as a driver of inequality, and on the need for political action to address it. But what is the function of finance capital in the modern world, and how should our politics address it? This panel will bring together various Marxist and anarchist perspectives on finance capital.

Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2nd rev ed, 2004) and Intellectuals and Socialism: 'Social Democrats' and the Labour Party (1994), She edited Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms in 2009. She is co-editing Volume 27 of Research in Political Economy with Paul Zarembka.

Alan Freeman is co-editor of the ā€˜Future of World Capitalismā€™ book series and is a former economist at the Greater London Authority. He wrote ā€˜The Benn Heresyā€™ and co-edited two books on value theory and, with Boris Kagarlitsky, ā€˜The Political Economy of Empire and the Crisis of Globalisation.ā€™ With Andrew Kliman he co-edits the new critical pluralist journal Critique of Political Economy.ā€™

Andrew Kliman, a professor of economics at Pace University, is the author of The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession and Reclaiming Marxā€™s ā€œCapitalā€: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency. He and Alan Freeman edit Critique of Political Economy, a new scholarly online journal. Many of his writings are available at akliman.squarespace.com and With Sober Senses, marxist-humanist-initiative.org/our-publication, Marxist-Humanist Initiativeā€™s publication.

Costas Panayotakis is Associate Professor of Sociology at CUNY's New York City College of Technology and author of Remaking scarcity: from capitalist inefficiency to economic democracy.

ACCORDING TO LENIN, the greatest contribution of the German Marxist radical Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) to the fight for socialism was the statement that her Social Democratic Party of Germany had become a ā€œstinking corpseā€ as a result of voting for war credits on August 4, 1914. Lenin wrote this about Luxemburg in 1922, at the close of the period of war, revolution, counterrevolution and reaction in which Luxemburg was murdered.
Hungarian literary critic and political theorist Georg LukĆ”cs is generally recognized, along with thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg, as one of the most influential intellectual figures of twentieth century Marxism. And while LukĆ”csā€™ reading of Marx is possibly the most sophisticated and intellectually rigorous to be found in the century and a half long trajectory of historical materialism, his legacy suffers from the ā€œmisfortuneā€ that, unlike Gramsci and Luxemburg, he survived what is known as the heroic period of Third International Marxism: the late teens and early twenties.