Date: Wednesday, 13 November 2019
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker: Aleksandr Buzgalin
Talk Title: ‘The End of History: The Political Economy of Post-Liberal Capitalism’
Location: Ramsden Room, St Catharine’s College

All are welcome. The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Economics and Policy Group at the Judge Business School.

Speaker:
Aleksandr Buzgalin is professor at the department of Political Economy and director of the Center for Modern Marxist Studies at Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, and Editor in Chief of Questions of Political Economy (Russian bilingual academic journal). He is also vice president of the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE).  Buzgalin is the author of more then 400 publications, including 23 books, translated into a number of languages. His areas of research focus on methodological and fundamental aspects of political economy, in particular contradictions of the late capitalism, caused by the new technological transformations and new qualities of market, money and capital in the era of creative revolution. Results of his research were published in Cambridge Journal of Economics, Science & Society and other journals. He is also the author of books and articles in the sphere of development studies, comparative analysis of economic systems and nature of Russian economy.

Talk Overview
Thirty years ago, Francis Fukuyama in his article ‘The End of History?’ formulated a thesis about the final victory of the neoliberal model of capitalism. But history does not stop. Two hundred years after the birth of Marx, The Economist wrote that the millenial generation chooses socialism, and the experts who prepared the report to the US president described socialism as the main threat. Alexander Buzgalin shows that the cause of these fears is the crisis of the existing system of economic relations and institutions of late capitalism. He systematizes the evidences of this crisis and shows, that dominant political and economic elite is looking for a way out of the impasse on the paths of ‘neoliberal conservatism’ that integrates further de-socialization and deregulation in the economy with conservative-authoritarian trends in politics and ideology. At the end of the contribution, Alexander Buzgalin reveals a number of ways of socialization, humanization and ecologization of capitalism, objectively conditioned by the progress of technologies and practices of civil society actors, which differ from the existing social democratic projects that have proved to be of little effectiveness

Please contact the seminar organisers Philip Arestis (pa267@cam.ac.uk) and Michael Kitson (mk24@cam.ac.uk) in the event of a query