Fitchian reflections on today’s news
This is my introduction for Ruthie Gilmore, who gave the third Robert Fitch memorial lecture at LaGuardia Community College in Queens on May 6, 2014. Many thanks to Karen Miller and her colleagues at LaGuardia for organizing the series. It’s always refreshing to visit LaGuardia College, where the buildings are named after letters. I went to a college where the buildings are named after slavers, financiers, and reactionary politicians. I’m very glad to be introducing the Third Robert Fitch Memorial Lecture. When I gave the first two years ago, I was worried… Read More
On Panitch & Gindin and American decline
These are comments I delivered at a panel on The Making of Global Capitalism, by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, at the Rethinking Marxism conference, held at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, on September 20, 2013. I interviewed them about the book here. I want to start by saying that I greatly admire this book, and pretty much everything these two guys have done over the years. Unusually for the genre, I meant every word of the blurb I supplied for it. A while back, I was on a panel with Radikha Desai, on which she… Read More
On not staging a mock conversion to the right
Here’s a slightly edited version of my opening remarks at last night’s panel on the right, featuring Corey Robin and me, moderated by Christian Parenti, held at UnionDocs in Brooklyn. It was a fine event, and thanks to all who made it possible. Audio will be posted somewhere soon. Given the day, I’d originally thought I would rue the absence of an actual right-winger on this panel, then recount my political history as a brief libertarian in my early college days, and announce my return to the fold after a long, frustrating career on the… Read More
Reflections on the current disorder
This is the text of the talks I gave at the University of California–Riverside and UC–Irvine, January 25 and 26, 2012. Graphs were added for the bloggy version. It’s funny. I spend most of my life writing about economics, politics, and finance, yet about the only academics who ever invite me to speak are in the humanities. Maybe that’s because I dropped out of a graduate English program and can’t do a proper vector autoregression. But you guys are more fun than a bunch of dismal scientists anyway. I took my title,… Read More
Against catastrophism
This is the text of my introduction to a panel on catastrophism that (Catastrophism and the Crisis of the Left) that I MC’d at the Left Forum, March 19, 2011, at Pace University, New York. Events in Japan have gotten me thinking about crises in general. At first, I thought that it might promote the realization that finding clean, renewable forms of energy may the most urgent task facing us today. But then I thought back a bit to other energy-related crises. One of my beefs with the peak oilers, aside from… Read More
Taking the measure of rot
[I gave this talk at a very good conference, New Deal/No Deal, at Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, on October 29. The panel chair was Michael Reich, who was the main organizer of the conference along with Richard Walker of the geography department. The dual themes were reflecting on the New Deal of the 1930s and how we’re not getting anything remotely comparable in the 2010s.] roots of crisis We all know the story of the proximate causes of the economic crisis – a housing bubble enabled by not merely… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 