Professor Mark Harvey, Director, CRESI, University of Essex
15th March 2012
At 16:00 in Room 6.345 and afterwards in the Sociology Common Room.
This presentation will develop an argument for a renewal of historical materialism by examining Marx’s conception of economy, as enshrined in the Labour Theory of Value. Developing a neo-Polanyian framework, which problematises what we mean by economy, the paper will argue that we need a much more radically historical and spatial understanding than is permitted by the closed circuit, commodity-capital, vision of the economy as presented in Capital. It will do so by playing a neo-Polanyian conception of ‘economies of labour’ against the Labour Theory of Value, and hence suggesting an alternative view of economy as open, multi-modal, and an outcome of complex causal interactions between economic, political, cultural and environmental dynamics. In so doing it retains, and indeed expands, a concern to understand the generation of systemic inequality in society to include rights over public as well as private, commodity, resources.
.
