CRITICAL THEORY AND RADICAL POLITICS
SEMINAR SERIES 2017/18
“On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction”
Professor Ivan Ascher (Uni of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
WEDNESDAY 1st of November,
Pavilion Parade, Room 304, 10.30am
As financial markets expand and refashion the world in their own image, the wealth of capitalist societies no longer presents itself, as it did to Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, as a "monstrous collection of commodities." Instead, it appears as an equally monstrous collection of financial securities. But what would it mean to write Capital in the twenty-first century? Are we really to believe that risk, rather than labor, is the true fount of economic value? Can it truly be the case that the credit relation -- at least in the global North -- has replaced the wage relation as the key site of exploitation and political struggle? And finally, if precarity is indeed the name of today's proletarian condition, what possible future does it actually portend, what analysis does it require?
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Professor Ivan Ascher teaches Political Theory at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. His recent publications explores the politics of contemporary capitalism, rethinking the politics of exploitation, of finance and of precarity. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.
