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Book Launch: In the Long Run We Are All Dead
A book launch to mark the publication of Geoff Mann's In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (Verso 2017), a groundbreaking debunking of moderate attempts to resolve financial crises.
In the ruins of the 2007鈥�2008 financial crisis, self-proclaimed progressives the world over clamoured to resurrect the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. The crisis seemed to expose the disaster of small-state, free-market liberalization and deregulation. Keynesian political economy, in contrast, could put the state back at the heart of the economy and arm it with the knowledge needed to rescue us. But what it was supposed to rescue us from was not so clear. Was it the end of capitalism or the end of the world? For Keynesianism, the answer is both. Keynesians are not and never have been out to save capitalism, but rather to save civilization from itself. It is political economy, they promise, for the world in which we actually live: a world in which prices are 鈥渟ticky,鈥� information is 鈥渁symmetrical,鈥� and uncertainty inescapable. In this world, things will definitely not take care of themselves in the long run. Poverty is ineradicable, markets fail, and revolutions lead to tyranny. Keynesianism is thus modern liberalism鈥檚 most persuasive internal critique, meeting two centuries of crisis with a proposal for capital without capitalism and revolution without revolutionaries.
If our current crises have renewed Keynesianism for so many, it is less because the present is worth saving, than because the future seems out of control. In that situation, Keynesianism is a perfect fit: a faith for the faithless.
AUTHOR BIO
Geoff Mann lives in Vancouver, where he teaches political economy and economic geography at 丁香园AV, and he directs the Centre for Global Political Economy. He is also the author of "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: A Reader鈥檚 Companion" (Verso, 2017) "Disassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism" (AK Press, 2013) and "Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers and the Political Economy of the American West" (UNC, 2007), which won the American Sociological Association鈥檚 Paul Sweezy Prize and the American Political Science Association鈥檚 Michael S. Harrington Award. "Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, co-authored with Joel Wainwright", will appear with Verso in January 2018.
Presented by
丁香园AV's Vancity Office of Community Engagement
