"Karl Polanyi Today" Seminar Series by Michael Burawoy

"KARL POLANYI TODAY"

SEMINAR SERIES

led by Professor Michael Burawoy

Mellon Distinguished Visiting Scholar

Organized by Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP)
University of Witwatersrand
in conjunction with the School of Social Science

With the rise of market fundamentalism since the 1970s Karl Polanyi has become a canonical figure in the social sciences. His book The Great Transformation, written in 1944, is an attempt to come to grips with the era of the 1930s – economic crash, the rise of fascism, Stalinism and social democracy, and the conflagration of the Second World War. He traces the calamities of the twentieth century to the rise of market fundamentalism, and the extension of commodification into areas where it can only be destructive. He wrote of “fictitious commodities” – land, labor and money – whose commodification threatened to destroy society, which in turn set in motion “counter-movements” against marketisation, often in the form of reactionary political regimes, but also social movements and new forms of socialism. In recent decades his work has provided a framework for studying many countries experiencing neoliberalism, including the stripping away of welfare and labor guarantees in the United States and European countries, the shock therapies of postsocialism in Russia, China and Eastern Europe, structural adjustment in postcolonial contexts. Polanyi’s work has inspired ideas of the developmental state. It has been deployed to understand globalization and what some have dared to call counter-hegemonic globalization. His ideas have been embraced by economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, anthropologists such as Keith Hart, sociologists such as Peter Evans, Fred Block and Ching Kwan Lee. Here in South Africa Edward Webster, Andries Bezuidenhout and Rob Lambert, authors of Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity, have amalgamated Polanyi’s ideas with those of Marx, which is where we start the seminar series:

Public lectures

March 31st , Noon-2p.m. MARX vs. POLANYI: Michael Burawoy and Eddie Webster discuss Grounding Globalization

April 15, 4p.m. Michael Burawoy, TRANSFORMING KARL POLANYI

Seminars

April 20, 4p.m., Seminar on Fictitious Commodities

April 29, 4p.m., Seminar on Neoliberalism

May 4, 4p.m., Seminar on Counter-Movements

All seminars take place in the Faculty of Humanities Graduate Seminar Room, South-West Engineering Building. There will be assigned readings for each seminar. So that we have some idea of numbers, we request those who are interested in attending the seminars TO PLEASE REGISTER with Shameen Govender at Shameen [dot] Govender [at] wits [dot] ac [dot] za

READINGS

Market and Society: