In his book The Politics of Global Competitiveness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), Paul Cammack analyses World Bank and OECD policy advice from the 1960s onwards, up to the initial response to COVID-19, and for the period 2010 onwards a good amount of material on the European Commission. In the light of his reading of Marx's Capital, he argues that the OECD and the World Bank have always been focused on furthering the development of the bourgeois mode of production on a global scale, rather than, say, promoting the interests of one or a group of advanced economies, or of existing capitalist firms, whether transnational or not. Along with Surbhi Kesar and Lucia Pradella as discussants, this exciting panel will discuss how best to understand, and resist, the politics of global competitiveness.

This event will take place on Zoom: please register here in advance for this meeting

SPEAKERS

Paul Cammack is honorary professorial research fellow in the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. He reviews books at What's Worth Reading: What to Read and What to Avoid in and around Critical Political Economy and works on the politics of the global political economy. His latest article is ‘Marx on Social Reproduction’, Historical Materialism, 28.2 (2020): 76-106. https://manchester.academia.edu/PaulCammack

Surbhi Kesar is a lecturer in the Department of Economics at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests are in the fields of economic development and political economy of development, specifically focusing on informal economy, processes of structural transformation and capitalist transition in labour surplus economies, issues of economic and social exclusion, and decolonised approaches towards the discipline of economics.

Lucia Pradella is a senior lecturer in international political economy at King’s College London. She is the author of The Actuality of Marx's Capital (2010) and Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy (2015), and co-editor of Polarizing Development: Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis (2015) and of The Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism (2021).