Marx After Growth
with Sean O’Brien
This four part lecture series asks what the Marxian critique of political economy can tell us about the twenty-first century, a period marked by deindustrialisation, economic stagnation, growing labour superfluity and a political landscape in which the figure of the worker no longer occupies the central space it once did.
Sean O’Brien is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. His research has appeared in Cultural Critique, Discourse, Science Fiction Studies, and Bloomsbury’s Companion to Marx, and is forthcoming in Crossings. He is co-editor of ‘Demos: We Have Never Been Democratic’, a special issue of the visual culture journal Public based on work developed during the 2015 Banff Research in Culture residency. His criticism has also appeared in a number of electronic journals and literary magazines, including GUTS Magazine, The Capilano Review, Vector, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Current projects include a collaborative book, Anti-Social Reproduction, and a monograph, Precarity and the Historicity of the Present: American Culture from Boom to Crisis.
You can also visit the Hythe for a transcript of these lectures.
Part 1: The lectures begin with an overview of Marx's method and the categories of his critique, before turning to consider theories of real abstraction, questions of geopolitical economy and the history of the capitalist class relation. Over the course of the lectures, I ask: What does the end of growth mean for the future of work? How should we think about the regularity of financial crisis? How might Marx's concept of a surplus population inform theories of racial blackness? What insights might Marx’s critique of value offer feminist theories of social reproduction? What does the decline of the workers' movement imply for an anti-capitalist politics today?
Part 2: This lecture explores an 'esoteric' current of Marxian thought rooted in the critique of value and distinct from the ‘exoteric’ Marx of traditional Marxism. Whereas classical political economy takes for granted capitalist forms such as value, labour, the commodity and money, Marx insists on the historical specificity of a social process in which labour is abstracted in order for commodities to be exchanged as values. This critical aspect of Marx’s work, however, was largely neglected by traditional Marxists, who tended - like classical political economists - to treat capitalist forms as natural and transhistorical features of human society. Drawing on Marx's analysis of the value-form, this lecture offers an overview of the esoteric Marx and considers the implications of his critique for theories of domination, abstraction and crisis.
Part 3: This lecture pivots from an abstract analysis of capital at its ideal average to explore the concrete history of capital accumulation over its longue durée. Drawing primarily on the work of Robert Brenner and Giovanni Arrighi, we'll look at the accounts they each offer of the historical origins of capital as well as its more recent restructuring in the late twentieth century, before turning to consider possible future trajectories of capital accumulation on a global scale with a focus on China. The lecture concludes with a discussion of the political implications of economic downturn for the workers' movement and the question of whether we now find ourselves in a Second Gilded Age, as a number of commentators have suggested, or if this is in fact something new.
Part 4: This fourth and final lecture of Marx After Growth examines the capitalist class relation: what it is, how it's reproduced, and how the dynamics of its reproduction have important implications for how we conceive of the production of gender, the ascriptions of race, and the shifting horizons of cycles of struggle, especially as the reproduction of the class relation is thrown into crisis in the late twentieth century. Working first through Marx's account of simple reproduction, the lecture then pivots to explore the Marxist feminist critique of social reproduction, before moving to consider the racialization of unemployment and the political significance of riot in a low-growth economy.