Conférences

Du capitalisme historique au capitalisme absolu ? Pour une nouvelle critique de l’économie politique.

Etienne Balibar, professeur émérite au département de philosophie de l’université Paris Ouest et Distinguished Professor of Humanities à l’Université de Californie à Irvine, travaille sur les questions d’épistémologie, de philosophie politique et d’anthropologie philosophique.

En anglais

From Historical to Absolute Capitalism? Towards a New Critique of Political Economy

The classical Critique of Political Economy, running from Karl Marx’s Capital (Volume One, 1867) to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944), has analyzed a long process of commodification of goods, activities, and resources, which was driven by the logic of unlimited accumulation of money and the subjection of labour to capital. With the dramatic events that simultaneously marked the end of the 20^th century: the achievement of financial globalization, and the collapse (or, in the case of China, reversal) of socialist experiences – sometimes combined under the name “neo-liberalism” – a new conviction has arisen that this marks the end of an historic cycle, and the beginning of a new era. There is wide disagreement, however, on its definition and its own tendencies of evolution. The lecture will apply a Marxian-Polanyian category of “real subsumption” and the production of “fictitious commodities” to discuss its intrinsic combination of politics and economy, and its violent instability.