'Political Economy: The Social Sciences' Red Pill'

This is the video recording of the event surrounding the appointment of Yanis Varoufakis as an Honorary Professor within the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. 

Many thanks to all the participants for making it such a special event!

The post Political Economy: The Social Sciences’ Red Pill appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

IIPPE 7th International Conference in Political Economy

‘Political Economy: International Trends and National Differences’

School of Economics & Management, University of Lisbon, Portugal

September 7-9, 2016

Call for Papers

‘The Political Economy of EU: the common home of European people or an imperialist integration?’

The European integration has been a long-standing and very ambitious project. It began in the post-WW II era in very different from today economic, social and geopolitical circumstances and has evolved till today. During its course it passed through several internal crises as well as major global crises (the 1974 and the 2007-8 ones being the more significant). From its very beginning was a matter of controversy both in general and within Political Economy and the Left. Two major camps emerged (and several sub-divisions). The first camp argues that the European integration project is an imperialist one, pushed forward by the dominant capitals of the Western European countries and aiming to exploit weaker economies and, in its course, to challenge US global supremacy. Thus, it is argued that the European integration is internally divided in at least two groups of countries: a dominant euro-centre and a dominated euro-periphery. Consequently, the task of the Left is to dismantle this reactionary project. The second camp argues that, despite any conservative hegemonies and later neoliberal foundations, the European integration is an inherently progressive process as it sets aside national conflicts and leads to a unified social and economic space in which the European working class has to struggle with the European capital for hegemony. Therefore, this camp supports pan-European initiatives for democratising and/or socialising the European integration.

The 2007-8 global capitalist crisis brought to the fore with invigorated force this controversy. After some initial mainstream musing about decoupling between the US and the European Union (EU) economies, the latter were engulfed in an ongoing crisis centred on the European Monetary Union (EMU) but also spread to the whole of the European integration. The division between euro-core and euro-periphery became more pronounced, brutal austerity programmes were imposed on many euro-periphery countries under the auspices of troikas (EU-IMF-ECB) and social and national tensions erupted. Questions like leaving the EMU (like Grexit) or leaving the EU (like the Brexit) came to the fore and are hotly debated both generally and within Political Economy and the Left.

This panel aims to study this issue. It aspires to gather contributions analyzing subjects like:

• The economic, social and political nature of the European integration
• Theories and approaches studying it (e.g. uneven and combined development, convergence)
• Specific economic mechanisms (e.g. EMU, current account and trade imbalances)
• Comparisons between EU economies
• Geopolitical issues

Abstracts should be submitted by April 1, 2016. To submit your abstract, please go to the Electronic Proposal Form and carefully follow the instructions there. (All deadlines are listed at the link.)

For more general information about IIPPE, the working groups and the conference, please visit our website. For details on the panel, you can contact Stavros Mavroudeas (smavro@uom.gr).

Call for Papers: Neoliberalism Working Group

Since 2008 neoliberalism has been in crisis across the globe. Signs of this ongoing crisis are evident in the recurrent volatility of global markets, stagnant economic growth and the growing popularity of explicitly anti-neoliberal politicians, parties and movements, all while governments continue to fall back upon traditional staples of neoliberal policies even as they turn to increasingly elaborate measures to reflate the economy. It is in this context that we welcome papers that reflect upon:

• Neoliberalism and crisis

• Alternatives to neoliberalism

• Strategies for resisting neoliberalism

• Neoliberalism and austerity

• Neoliberalism and market volatility

• The uneven development of neoliberalism and crisis

• The role of neoliberal ideology.

Papers and proposals can be submitted on iippe.org by 1 April 2016. Alternatively, please contact the Neoliberalism Working Group convenors:

Kean Birch (kean@yorku.ca)

Damien Cahill (damien.cahill@sydney.edu.au)

Alfredo Saad-Filho (as59@soas.ac.uk)

In 1959, C. Wright Mills coined the term ‘sociological imagination’ to illustrate how sociologists can provide unique insight via a broad analysis of the social. Via this critical process, we can remove ourselves from everyday life, seeing the social in the personal. The 2015 TASA (The Australian Sociological Association) conference focused on neoliberalism and how it has affected the Asia-Pacific. Through stepping back and thinking “ourselves away” from the milieu, we approached this problem via many sociological frameworks that addressed a variety of structural, agential, empirical and theoretical topics. However, over the course of the conference, I could not help but notice a succinct trend within each of the presentations. Despite the diversity of the lenses being used to view the issues at hand, we were mostly discussing the systemic problems of a late modernity that overly favoured elite interests and economic rationalities.

Let me explain this via some examples. First, Professor Eva Cox opened the conference powerfully with her message of hope and rebellion, arguing we need to underscore the social in the social sciences in Australia and calling sociologists to participate in a more critical role in this time of curtailing choices and truncated meaning. To address worsening social inequality and fracturing futures, she suggests a return to big picture sociology that dares to visit what Jurgen Habermas calls utopian thinking (in a time where utopian thinking has been exhausted). We as sociologists have been robbed of utopia as an ideal – in other words, the dominance of neoliberal rationalism has seen us accept caveats and half-measures which represent the desires of Economic Human more than the needs of a civil society.

Second, in a session for the Cultural Sociology thematic group, several diverse topics were approached; however, it was the contemporary cultural framing of work that underscored how neoliberalist ideals have infiltrated career narratives. Dr Sarah James examined the popular idea that work needs to be ‘meaningful’ more than necessarily lucrative; and furthering this, Fabian Cannizzo studied how academics describe their work as being driven by ‘passion’ and their relationship with university management’s neoliberal imperatives.

Third, in a session for the vibrant Family, Relationships and Gender thematic group, Michelle Dyer discussed how international development discourse is strongly underpinned by neoliberal economic rationalisations. She studied how women’s empowerment in developing countries is presented as salvation for the entire nation – and how women are dually represented as victims and saviours. It is worthwhile looking at Nike’s www.girleffect.org as this campaign is an exemplar of Michelle’s argument. This mythos ignores the reality of gender relations in developing countries and also avoids any critical reflection how such campaigns are smokescreens for the wider structural issues such as the effects of unethical corporate practices.

What these presentations and topics have in common are the permeation of market ideals and rationality into the discourse of everyday life. Some of the papers, such as Michelle’s, examined the localised effects of neoliberalism in places such as the Solomon Islands; but also considered the wider international political economy of the problem. In this paradigm, tribal peoples grieve the loss of land, the loss of their cultural heritage and self as business buys what they see as valuable real estate for future profits and growth. Using our sociological imagination, we must consider the two very different worldviews and realise that the two ‘ways of seeing’ are incongruous. Furthermore, using political economy, we may also think of how current global power relations, economics and dominant norms feed into this problem. The perspective of subaltern peoples is drowned out by the drone of bulldozers logging their sacred forests. The profit motive is hegemonic and for now, it prevails. What is a sociologist to do?

The Sociology of Economic Life roundtable on the Thursday afternoon generated some practical answers and critical reflection upon some of these problems. Dr Tom Barnes addressed some dominant myths of neoliberalism and then, adding to this, Elizabeth Humphrys discussed how neoliberalism unfolded in Australia. Rather than being a product of the Right, in Australian contexts, neoliberalism emerged from the 1980s Labor government and the Unions with their Prices and Incomes Accord agreements, which gradually saw the introduction of economically rational ideals and a whittling down of labour. At the conclusion of the session, Dr. Dina Bowman provided an important perspective that we need to make ourselves available: to NGOs, to business, wherever sociology is needed.

I took a lot away from #TASA2015. I felt inspired and revitalised. My economic sociological Ph.D. work looks at how luxury consumption and economic inequality may interact. I lean towards critical theories and I unashamedly indulge in utopian thinking. I love William Morris’ ‘News from Nowhere’ and my copy of Marcuse’s ‘One Dimensional Man’ has been read more than a few times. I agree with Eva. We need to reconsider grand theory and sociology as activism. We need to think about political economy in our sociological analysis – because the neoliberal economic rationality is everywhere. As Fabian Cannizzo argues, it even saturates academic governance and the very work we do. In order for us to address the snowballing issue of neoliberalism encompassing and enlarging, we must see these problems as an urgent call-to-arms – to use our positions to make ourselves useful to society and to not shy away from challenging the status quo.

Photograph courtesy of Lou Horton

During the Cold War Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997) was one of Australia’s best known communists. During 1954-55 he was a high profile hostile witness subpoenaed by the partisan Royal Commission on Espionage, established following the defection of Canberra based Soviet diplomat and counter-intelligence operative Vladimir Petrov. The Commission was partisan political theatre, seeking, unsuccessfully, to establish links between Soviet espionage, the Australian Labour Party (ALP), and the Communist Party of Australia (CPA).  When Lockwood left the CPA in 1969 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, it was an event drawing national media attention. His death in 1997 occasioned national and international attention.

Lockwood joined the CPA in 1939. Trained from early childhood as a typesetter/journalist on the small rural newspaper owned by his father in rural Victoria, and educated in the elite Wesley College (Melbourne), Lockwood joined the growing media empire of Australian press baron Sir Keith Murdoch in 1930, working on the Murdoch flagship the Melbourne Herald. Historian Don Watson has described the paper at the time as “a hotchpotch of almost incredible banality, and intelligent, often liberal, social and political comment”. Its young journalists were among “the best of their generation”.

The liberal leftism of colleagues helped shape Lockwood’s politics, and in 1935 he went abroad with permission to find media work and add to his value as a member of the Murdoch organisation.  With a roving commission to file Herald feature articles, Lockwood headed to Asia. Based in Singapore, he variously worked for the English language press and Reuters. He travelled extensively, visiting the Netherlands East Indies, Siam, French Indo China, and Japan. In the process he became aware of European racist attitudes and policies, the strength of national independence movements, and foresaw a future Asia freed from colonialism. He also became alarmed by the strength, ruthlessness, and expansionist intent of Japanese militarism, something not widely understood in Australia at the time.

Heading to Fleet Street, Lockwood made his way through China, Russia, Europe, and in 1937 began filing reports from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War reporting the Republican cause. These  experiences radicalised him. Upon returning to Melbourne and the Herald, he increasingly became involved in anti-fascist, left-wing, and civil libertarian issues and politics. Following a personal clash with Murdoch in 1939, Lockwood quit the paper and joined the CPA.

By 1950 Lockwood had become widely known in Australia as a communist, journalist, pamphleteer, broadcaster and orator, and was the subject of intense surveillance by Australian security services. During the Cold War, aside from party work, he edited the Maritime Worker journal of the Waterside Workers Federation (WWF).  This was an 8-page fortnightly newspaper for between 24,000-27,000 unionised waterfront workers, organised nationally in some 50 port branches.

According to Industrial Relations’ historian Tom Sheridan, Lockwood’s role as journalist/editor was a significant factor contributing to the long and successful term in office of WWF General Secretary Jim Healy (1937-1961), contributing significantly to keeping right-wing influence at bay while keeping alive a militant political culture within the union.

Lockwood was a powerful public speaker, eloquent and witty, according to numerous commentators and comments in his security dossiers. He was also a prolific and popular pamphleteer. In Lockwood’s pamphleteering  the oral and the literary met, the launch of one of his pamphlets mounted as an event, usually done in association with a public address by Lockwood. The pamphlets were produced in runs of between 5,000-20,000 copies, in booklet form of about 4,000 words in length. Overall, these pamphlets had educational purpose and intent, tended to be lively, entertaining, and the language accessible. His approach to pamphleteering tended to reject the quotation and referencing of communist stalwarts like Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and instead referenced a diversity of other sources, for example the Bible, Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Lord Byron.

Sometimes CPA pamphlets became ‘books’, longer and sustained works, more expensive but not prohibitively so, and packaged cheaply and marketed in the same way as a pamphlet. This was the case with Lockwood’s 94-page America Invades Australia (1955), dealing with the growth and extent of American investment in the Australian economy, especially post-1945, and the ways in which this acted to establish a relationship of colonial dependence with the US economy. It also examined the historical foundations of the key capitalist interests involved. The account was supported by Lockwood’s readings of American historical sources, and extensive reading of financial literatures.

The end result of the Australia/US relationship, Lockwood argued, was that Australia would become enmeshed in America’s future “plan for aggression against Asia”, with Australia used as a safe American military base for deployments against Asia, This text, a fragment of extensive original research by Lockwood on Australian political economy now in the archives of the National Library of Australia, has largely gone unnoticed. Writing in 1998, North American historian Bruce C. Daniels considered it a “prophetic” book, a pioneering work of political economy manifesting an interest and a theme that Australian scholars and analysts would take up a decade later.

During the 1950s Lockwood also published original work about Australian history and political economy in the Communist Review, the CPA ‘theoretical journal’ (1934-1966). It is a body of work that political scientist John Playford in 1970 reckoned that Australian scholars “could have learned a great deal from”.  Complete with Endnotes regarding sources, these articles ranged across Australian history, anticipating themes and issues associated with academic historians and political economists from the late 1960s onwards: indigenous dispossession and extermination; the development of ‘White Australia’ attitudes and policies; the history of monopolies and monopoly behaviour; the political economy of the 1890s; the development of political labour; the history and nature of the ALP and its emergence as the “the principal political organisation of Australian national capital”; US and Australia relations during the twentieth century; the development in Australia of a sense of “Pacific regional security”, in which the U.S. was regarded as a necessary partner.

Demonstrating the utilitarian way Lockwood saw his role as an historian – as contributing to ongoing industrial/political campaigning and struggles – a cluster of articles in 1955-1956 was devoted to aspects of the Australian shipping industry. Lockwood explored reasons why Australian shipowners had failed to create a national/international shipping presence commensurate with the nation’s volume of imports/exports. According to Lockwood, reasons were to be found in the ways British shipping interests had worked, historically, to hinder/prevent the development of Australian shipping. In the Lockwood analysis, the roots of this were in colonial history, and colonial attitudes prevailing post-Federation. These articles linked with a long running campaign by the Seamen’s Union of Australia to extend the operations, and increase the size, of the Australian shipping fleet.

Regarding monopolies generally, Lockwood argued it was simplistic to lump them together as though they and their behaviours were all the same. While they often acted together, as capitalist formations they were best understood with regard to factors like their individual histories, the origins of their capital, the nature of their investments, the biographies of their leaderships.

Lockwood’s focus on Australian history was part of a cultural milieu within the CPA that developed significantly during the 1940s and continued through the Cold War amongst intellectuals drawn to the party. It was an attempt to understand and describe/define the ‘Australianness’ of Australian culture, particularly in terms of literature and history. The aim was to develop a sense of radical nationalism, one free from the legacies of British colonialism, strong enough during the 1950s to counter the conservatism of British traditions embodied in the ideology of the Menzies government, and robust enough to enable Australia to face the future independent from increasing subservience to the US.

In researching, writing and publishing ‘history’ in the communist press, Lockwood was part of an Australian tradition described by radical historian Terry Irving, of historians “embedded in labour movement institutions”, their significant work variously challenging imperial, white dominated, ruling class histories, their accounts “scarcely recognised” in the academy, their work often anticipating/pre-dating themes and issues that are regarded as originating later in the academy. This ‘scarce recognition’ applies too, to Lockwood’s writings on political economy.

*A detailed study of Lockwood’s research and writings relating to political economy and history is in Rowan Cahill, “Rupert Lockwood (1908-1997): Journalist, Communist, Intellectual”, Doctoral thesis,  University of Wollongong, 2013.