Marx After Growth 3: The History of Accumulation (Sean O'Brien, the87press)

This lecture pivots from an abstract analysis of capital at its ideal average to explore the concrete history of capital accumulation over its longue durée. Drawing primarily on the work of Robert Brenner and Giovanni Arrighi, we'll look at the accounts they each offer of the historical origins of capital as well as its more recent restructuring in the late twentieth century, before turning to consider possible future trajectories of capital accumulation on a global scale with a focus on China. The lecture concludes with a discussion of the political implications of economic downturn for the workers' movement and the question of whether we now find ourselves in a Second Gilded Age, as a number of commentators have suggested, or if this is in fact something new.

Sean O’Brien is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. His research has appeared in Cultural Critique, Discourse, Science Fiction Studies, and Bloomsbury’s Companion to Marx, and is forthcoming in Crossings. He is co-editor of ‘Demos: We Have Never Been Democratic’, a special issue of the visual culture journal Public based on work developed during the 2015 Banff Research in Culture residency. His criticism has also appeared in a number of electronic journals and literary magazines, including GUTS Magazine, The Capilano Review, Vector, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Current projects include a collaborative book, Anti-Social Reproduction, and a monograph, Precarity and the Historicity of the Present: American Culture from Boom to Crisis.

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