Confronting capitalism: CPERN themes at IIPPE/CPERN/ISA

We are fortunate to have the collective Critical Political Economy Research Network CPERN joining us at the forthcoming IIPPE/CPERN/IPE Conference

September 13-15, 2017 Berlin School of Economics and Law

CPERN Keynote speaker will be Dr Laura Horn

Make sure to select ‘CPERN’ in the category of Working Groups when you submit!

Please email Phoebe Moore for questions: p.moore@mdx.ac.uk

THEMES (in alphabetical order)

Confronting (inherently unstable) capitalism

This stream will critically analyse (global) anti-capitalist, anarchist, feminist, cooperative and other movements that both destabilise capitalist tendencies and represent moments that disrupt relations of domination and exploitation, but also remain unsure about how to develop into more substantial anti-capitalist movements. Panels seek contributions about how social movements have met transformations in capitalism, or new left convergences are being coopted by political parties, e.g. in Brazil, Rojava, Chile, the Czech Republic, Spain, landless workers’ movement, and the radical left in Africa and more.

Debt and financialised capitalism

This stream speaks to the interrelated workings of ‘states’ and ‘markets’ in the reproduction of (financialised) capitalism. To what extent are public and private actors cooperating in the creation, expansion and reshaping of markets? How are state-market interactions evolving in an economy reliant on and fuelled by household and student debt? How does financialised capitalism impact inequality in terms of gender, class and race? What are the current or potential forms of resistance to markets and the commodification of debt, and to financialised capitalism overall?

Destabilising labour processes: The machinery question

The machine question is back with a vengeance with the threat of automation, the algorithmic boss, gig economies and platform work. This stream looks at problems that the contemporary machine question poses for organising workers and resistance. To do so, we will look at extreme quantified workplaces with self-tracking and monitoring of all-of-life and affective digitalised labour, changing concepts of urban guerrillas and hacking, digital intermediation platforms and the human price of everyday rhetorics in the digital economy.

Regional destabilisation and uneven capitalist development

Regions have risen and fallen. This stream will look at areas of destabilisation of regional groupings and integration practices, from the much-heralded alternatives seen in the Pink Tide (and its fall), to questions of continuation and challenges to neoliberalism through regional disintegration. How has regional change impacted age-old inequalities of gender, class, race? Discussions may include the urgency of reviewing regional significance brought to the fore with Brexit, critical perspectives on the interface of EU investment politics with trade/trade agreements and on recarving (virtual) accumulation spaces as mechanisms of capitalism’s transformativity.

Confirmed speakers and contributors: David Bailey (also honorary organiser for CPERN), Adam Fishwick, Michael Goddard, Baruch Gottlieb, Ted Huang, Athina Karatzogianni, Zoe Malone, Caroline Metz, Johnna Montgomerie, Phoebe Moore, Anitra Nelson, Alex Nunn, Sophia Price , Alex Prichard, Daniela Tepe-Belfrage, Leo Uestebay, Martin Upchurch, Angela Wigger, Owen Worth, Yuliya Yurchenko

CPERN is a collective with a similar set of activist convictions to IIPPE. CPERN is based with the European Sociological Association, and we have been discussing co-organising a conference for a number of years. Dr Phoebe Moore is the CPERN representative for this event.

To contribute to the conference’s overall themes, CPERN calls for papers and panels that want to destabilise perceptions in political economy that breed closed talking shops and echo chambers. We aim to talk about how the urgencies of rampant inequality and instability bring us to query how and why they have become so widespread in the global capitalist economy; to critically discuss how social and structural imbalances are fuelled by extremely unbalanced power relations; and, importantly, to consider how we can tackle these issues, whether by challenging stagnant ideas in political economy and theories, or disputing the conditions under which instability and inequality have been emerging.

The themes above reflect desired CPERN contributions based on suggestions from CPERN members and the Executive Board: Monica Clua Losada, Angela Wigger, Phoebe Moore and Caroline Metz.

However, feel free to submit papers/panel proposals that may not precisely fit with the below, but fit with the conference themes instability and inequality.