Event today: LAUNCH EVENT for our new issue: "Towards a Critical Theory of Finance"
There's still no field dedicated to theorizing the ill effects of the new rules of finance.
Event Today: Monday, June 15 ~ 7am PT / 10am ET / 3pm BST
“Towards a Critical Theory of Finance”: Melinda Cooper, Radhika Desai, and Stefan Eich in conversation with Paul North
This event is launching off our next publication.
Hegel turned the world onto its head and Marx turned it back on its feet, and now finance is turning the world on its head again. In the early 19th century, Hegel proposed that human history was shaped by consciousness, by human spirit, by the head. Marx argued, in turn, that history was actually determined by practical social conditions, by the way people make their means of living, standing on their feet. It was capitalism that made it seem like heads, owners of industry and leaders of states and their apologists, intellectuals, made history happen, and not workers. The feet were the source of power while the heads claimed all the power for themselves.
It is harder to believe this is true now. Industry does not matter much to finance, and labor even less. Finance packages up the productive economy to resell it according to its own rules. A few prescient people have been studying the way the new rules ruin living conditions, pervert political possibilities, and increasingly dominate the global order. Yet, there is still no field dedicated to theorizing the ill effects of the newly upside-down world. We need, in short, a critical theory of finance.
Melinda Cooper is Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the interaction between neoliberal and new conservative philosophies of power.
Stefan Eich is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. His research is in political theory and the history of political thought, in particular the political theory of money and financial capitalism.
Radhika Desai is a political economist and scientist. She is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, and Director, Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba. She proposed geopolitical economy as a Marxist analysis of the international relations of the capitalist world that is historical, integrates the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’, class and nation, in a single framework that is capable of anticipating and explaining the rise of the multipolar world.
Paul North is Professor of German at Yale University. He writes and teaches on literature and other media, continental philosophy, literary and critical theory. He is editor (along with Paul Reitter) of a new translation of Marx’s Capital.
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Closing:
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Enjoy today’s event!
Marie Snyder, Substack Manager