Prabhat Patnaik – Capitalism and its Current Crisis

In September 2015, Prabhat Patnaik spoke at the Inaugural Conference of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) at the University of Manitoba.

Patnaik is an Indian economist and political commentator who taught at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, from 1974 until his retirement in 2010.

He was the Vice-Chairman of the Planning Board of the Indian state of Kerala from June 2006 to May 2011 and in 2008 was part of a four-member high-power United Nations task force chaired by Josephy Stiglitz, to recommend reform measures for the global financial system.

Video produced by Sean Cain and Nicholas Kocay.

Download text of the keynote

Kari Polanyi Levitt – Decline of the West and Rise of the Rest?

In September 2015, Kari Polanyi Levitt spoke at the Inaugural Conference of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG).

Born in Vienna in 1923, Kari is the only child of Ilona Duczynska and Karl Polanyi, the author of “The Great Transformation”. Fleeing fascism, she studied at the LSE’s wartime Cambridge campus before moving to Canada to where her numerous works include the minor classic Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada.

She was instrumental in founding the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development and in 1982 produced Canadian Policy in the Caribbean, a 300-page report to the Sub-Committee of the Standing Committee on External Affairs and National Defence of the Canadian House of Commons.

Video produced by Sean Cain and Nicholas Kocay.

Boris Kagarlitsky – Post Communist Russia in a Multipolar World

Boris Kagarlitsky spoke at the Inaugural Conference of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at Winnipeg, Manitoba in September 2015.

Boris Kagarlitsky, born in Moscow in 1958, was a dissident and political prisoner in the USSR under Brezhnev for more than a year, then a deputy to Moscow city council who was arrested again in 1993 under Yeltsin. Since 2007, he has run the Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements in Moscow, a leading Russian leftist think tank.

He is the editor of the online magazine Rabkor and an author of numerous books, of which the two most recent to appear in English are ”Empire of the Periphery” (Pluto) and “From Empires to Imperialism” (Routledge). He is as prominent a critic of Western stereotypical reportage on Russia and Ukraine, as he has been outspoken in his criticism of the Putin Regime.

Produced by Sean Cain and Nicholas Kocay.

GERG Inaugural Conference Panel – Reflections on a Century of Transformation

This event marked the inaugural conference of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group on “From the Thirty Years’ Crisis to Multipolarity: the Geopolitical Economy of the 21st Century World.”

Conference Keynote speakers reflected on some key ways in which the world has changed since the First World War opened the transformative Thirty Years’ Crisis of 1914-1945.

Chaired by Radhika Desai. Speakers included:

Aimee Craft, Johanna Brenner, Boris Kagarlitsky and Prabhat Patnaik.

This event marked the inaugural conference of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group on “From the Thirty Years’ Crisis to Multipolarity: the Geopolitical Economy of the 21st Century World.”

Conference Keynote speakers reflected on some key ways in which the world has changed since the First World War opened the transformative Thirty Years’ Crisis of 1914-1945.

Chaired by Radhika Desai. Speakers included: Aimee Craft, Johanna Brenner, Boris Kagarlitsky and Prabhat Patnaik.

For more information, go to www.seanc74.sg-host.com.

Produced by Sean Cain and Nicholas Kocay.

US Feminisms Confront Capitalist Restructuring and Neo-Liberal Austerity, by Johanna Brenner

Johanna Brenner is Professor Emeritus of Sociology/Women’s Studies and a life-long activist in feminist, community, and labor solidarity movements.

After spending four years as a telephone installation worker in the 1970s, she began her academic career at Portland State University in Portland Oregon where she served as the Coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program from 1982 to 2005 and taught in the Sociology Department until 2010.

She is the author of Women and the Politics of Class (Monthly Review Press) and articles in scholarly as well as left journals. Her most recent publications include “21st Century Socialist Feminism,” (Socialist Studies), “Caring in the City,” (Jacobin), and “Selling Sexual Services: A Socialist Feminist Perspective,” (Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture).

Produced by Sean Cain and Nicholas Kocay.

Paulo Drinot – The Great Depression in Latin America

Professor Paulo Drinot spoke at the Inaugural Conference of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group (GERG) at the University of Manitoba in September 2015.

Paulo Drinot, Latin American historian and co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Studies, writes widely on the history of Latin America especially Peru.

Now at University College London he studied economic history at the LSE before receiving his Mphil and Dphil at Oxford. His main research focus is the history of Peru in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His thematic interests include labour history and state formation, racism and exclusion, gender and sexuality, the social history of medicine, and memory and historiography.

His current projects include a an edited collection on the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces (1968-1975) in Peru, and an edited volume on comics and collective memory in Latin America.

Produced by Sean Cain and Nicholas Kocay.