• Andy Merrifield: Crowd Politics. Or, ‘Here Comes Everybuddy’.

January 27th (Manchester) Andrew Merrifiled
February 24th (Leeds) Christopher Wylde
March 23rd (York) John Weeks
April 27th (venue tbc) Dae-oup Chang

As always please feel free to extend the invitation to participate to any comrades you think might be interested, and of course come along yourself!

Anyone interested in presenting should drop Stuart, greig, Hugo or Werner an email with relevant details.

28th November: Rage
6pm, Business School Western Lecture Theatre. Business School. University of Leeds

29th November: The Rule of Money
6pm, Business School Western Lecture Theatre. Business School. University of Leeds

30th November: Break the Power of Money! Communise!
6pm, The Space Project,  37-38 Mabgate Green Leeds.

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Professor John Holloway is spending some time as a visiting professor at the School of Geography, University of Leeds in 2011 and is teaching at the MA in Activism and Social Change. For more information about John’s work visit these sites: http://johnhollowayinleeds.wordpress.com/ and  www.johnholloway.com.mx

The lectures are free and open to the public and there is no need to book.

About the venues:

• Business School Western Lecture Theatre, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT.
• Space project, 37-38 Mabgate Green, LS9 7DS.  It’s a non commercial space in Leeds facilitated by the Really Open University.

The lectures will be recorded and uploaded on this site. A previous lecture that John gave in Leeds can be watched here.
Facebook event:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=176848099067182

For more information about these lectures and John’s visit: http://johnhollowayinleeds.wordpress.com/ or contact Sara Gonzalez: s.gonzalez@leeds.ac.uk or 0113 343 6639

Romain Felli, Visiting research fellow, Geography, University of Manchester and post-doctoral fellow, Swiss National Science Foundation.

Managing climate insecurity by ensuring continuous capital accumulation: “climate refugees” and “climate migrants”.

Saturday 11.00 Lecture 4. HEGEL ON HISTORY AND THE END OF HISTORY  http://bit.ly/fh0wlQ
Saturday 2.00 Lecture 5. THE PHENOMENOLOGY’S CONCEPTION OF SCIENCE, OR, FROM HEGEL TO COMMON SENSE http://bit.ly/eCCndX

From Joss Winn:
Hello everyone, In our discussions over drinks on Friday, Mike and I mentioned a couple of things we are working on. Here are the links:
1) Student as Producer: http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/ in particular, there are some articles which you may be interested in: http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/documents/
2) The Social Science Centre: http://socialsciencecentre.org.uk/ Social Science Centre Discussion list: https://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo/ssc
It was great to meet you all and I found our two days together very
invigorating.

This is just to confirm the meeting in April. The date: Friday 8 and Saturday 9 April, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The place: University of York, England, Wenworth room W/30. The room takes 45(+) people, and is close to a cafeteria.

The idea is that Richard will circulate the text of his Five Lectures on Hegel about two weeks in advance. We shall have a morning and an afternoon session on each of the two days devoted to the discussion of the texts. The recommended (but not obligatory) reading for the meeting is Hegel’s Phenomenology.

We wish to keep the arrangements as informal as possible. The meeting is open to anyone interested, but we aim to ensure that there will be a core of people with an established interest in hearing and discussing Richard’s views on the topic.

We have done nothing to arrange accommodation, but perhaps those who intend to travel from outside York could contact those already in York (Werner and/ or Christos) for advice.  It would be helpful if people could now confirm whether they intend to be there.

Any one interested should email John Holloway <johnholloway@prodigy.net.mx>

Friday 29th October 2pm-4pm

Beech Grove House, Leeds  University.

Map here: http://www.lssi.leeds.ac.uk/graphics/lssi_campus_map.pdf

Kalim Siddiqui, The Political Economy of Capitalist Development in South Asia

John Smith
Imperialism and the Globalisation of Production

Abstract
Far from overcoming the North-South divide, neoliberal globalisation has greatly amplified the exploitative and parasitic—and therefore imperialist—character of relations between Triad nations and the global South.

The severest and therefore most appropriate test of this thesis is to identify neoliberal globalisation’s newest, most transformational feature and ask whether it is leading to the erosion or to the reinforcement of the North-South divide. This, so argues this thesis, is the globalisation of production processes, a qualitatively new stage in the global development of the capital/labour relation, manifested in a ‘global shift’ of industrial production to low-wage nations.

Analysis reveals that the principal force driving this transformation are the efforts of northern-based TNCs to cut costs and increase profits by substituting higher-wage domestic labour with low-wage southern labour, in consequence becoming ever more dependent on the proceeds of this super-exploitation, only a small portion of which appears in financial flow data.

This thesis gives centre stage to the emerging, rapidly growing southern component of the global working class, to the conditions of its social existence, to the manner of its insertion into the global economy, and to patterns and trends in southern wages. Its central argument: the contribution of southern living labour to global wealth is massively understated, including in currently-influential Marxist literature on ‘global capitalism’ and ‘new imperialism’.

This thesis grounds its argument by analysing what GDP and trade data reveals about the globalisation of production; it then asks what this data conceals, developing a critique of the neoclassical assumptions which profoundly vitiate what is universally, and erroneously, regarded as objective raw material.

It concludes that GDP measures not what a nation produces but what it captures; that just as GDP obscures the exploitation of labour by capital, so it obscures the exploitation of southern labour by northern capital.