Suchergebnisse

Political Economy Seminar
Together We'll Break These Chains of Love? The Community Ideal and the Multi-Criterial Economy
Presenter: Aaron Benanav, Syracuse University
Respondent: Dr Mike Beggs
Date: Tuesday, 24 October 2023
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm (AEDT)
Seminar via Zoom for University of Sydney staff, students and affiliates. For further information please contact John Clegg (j.clegg@sydney.edu.au) or Claire Parfitt (claire.parfitt@sydney.edu.au).
Community regulation has long been heralded as an alternative to market-driven rapaciousness. Communities pool resources, use them responsibly, and foster relationships rooted in trust and mutual support. From community gardens and communes to "the commons" and even communism, we find a widely shared sense that communities—especially when organized democratically—can manage or plan economic relations in ways that are more humane than markets. However, this community ideal has a darker side. Too often, communities maintain the peace through intense surveillance, threats of exclusion, and violence. Furthermore, individuals frequently invoke "the community" to further personal or sectional-group interests, to the detriment of those they claim to represent. Such concerns were central to neoliberal critiques of the left launched by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, all of whom claimed that socialist economies were intrinsically flawed precisely because they were organized around this ideal: the community regulation of production. This talk delves into the left’s enduring community ideal, especially as it relates to public ownership and public management of the economy, as well as the neoliberal critique of this ideal. The key claim is that the allure of community regulation was its promise to integrate larger numbers of people and multiple production criteria—beyond the efficient use of scarce resources—into the organization of the social provisioning process. While the inclusion of both politically marginalized populations and diverse social values promised to make economic coordination simpler and more harmonious, it actually heightened complexity and conflict in ways that communities were unable to manage on their own. This talk begins the work of reconstructing and rebuilding a vision of the multi-criterial economy, by explaining how we might rethink community, not as the organizing agent of a future society, but rather as one of its results.
The post Seminar: Aaron Benanav, ‘Together We'll Break These Chains of Love? The Community Ideal and the Multi-Criterial Economy’ appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Political Economy Seminar
The uncertain foundations of sustainable investing and the politics of risk
Speaker: Dr Claire Parfitt, University of Sydney
Date and time: Tuesday 12 September at 12 noon
Location: Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 650, The University of Sydney
The post Seminar: Claire Parfitt, ‘The uncertain foundations of sustainable investing and the politics of risk’ appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

This article contributes to scholarly debates about the relationship between precarity and financialization by applying Randy Martin's concept of the social derivative to the phenomenon of responsible investment. It explores how responsible investment emerges as an avenue for political action in the context of disintermediated governance. Analyzing one strategy of responsible investment, the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks into investment decision making, through the frame of the social derivative, the article argues that a derivative logic of ethics underpins ESG risk management. This complicates contemporary understandings of precarity as risk-shifting, because ESG integration creates connections between unlikely parties, opening up new forms and directions for political contest through finance. However, the article reveals that the contingent and profit-driven ethics on which ESG risk management is based establishes a narrow foundation on which these contests take place.

Review of Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population, London, Routledge, 2014, 284 pp., £26.99 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-415-82267-1

The introduction to this special issue of Critical Sociology offers an interpretation of recent debates in the precarity literature and the role precarity plays in a wide range of disciplines' scholarship. It makes the case for a broad conceptualization of precarity, one that recognises many dimensions and sites of precariousness in contemporary life. In addition to providing grounded examples of precarity experienced in this broad sense, this collection of articles focuses on responses to precarity and strategies that individuals, collectives and institutions are taking to address an increasingly precarious life. The collection focuses on Australia, where the authors are based. This affords readers an opportunity to observe the particularities of precarity in Australia, where some elements of the neoliberal welfare state have cushioned, and others have sharpened, people's experience of volatility and uncertainty.

1. Introduction -- 2. The Crisis of Higher Education: International and Australian -- 3. Struggles Against the Precariousness and Fragmentation of Academic Work -- 4. The Australian Context and Background to the Research -- 5. From Precarity to Security? 'We've got to do a better job for the casuals' -- 6. Managerial Motivations and Contexts -- 7. Silence in the Academy? Impacts of Role Fragmentation -- 8. Teaching and Research in the 21st Century University. 9. Conclusion.