MENU

Video, Past Event, Social Justice, Arts & Culture

Book Launch: In the Long Run We Are All Dead

October 12, 2017


A book launch to mark the publication of Geoff Mann's In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (Verso 2017), a groundbreaking debunking of moderate attempts to resolve financial crises.

In the ruins of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, self-proclaimed progressives the world over clamoured to resurrect the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. The crisis seemed to expose the disaster of small-state, free-market liberalization and deregulation. Keynesian political economy, in contrast, could put the state back at the heart of the economy and arm it with the knowledge needed to rescue us. But what it was supposed to rescue us from was not so clear. Was it the end of capitalism or the end of the world? For Keynesianism, the answer is both. Keynesians are not and never have been out to save capitalism, but rather to save civilization from itself. It is political economy, they promise, for the world in which we actually live: a world in which prices are “sticky,” information is “asymmetrical,” and uncertainty inescapable. In this world, things will definitely not take care of themselves in the long run. Poverty is ineradicable, markets fail, and revolutions lead to tyranny. Keynesianism is thus modern liberalism’s most persuasive internal critique, meeting two centuries of crisis with a proposal for capital without capitalism and revolution without revolutionaries.

If our current crises have renewed Keynesianism for so many, it is less because the present is worth saving, than because the future seems out of control. In that situation, Keynesianism is a perfect fit: a faith for the faithless.

AUTHOR BIO

Geoff Mann lives in Vancouver, where he teaches political economy and economic geography at Simon Fraser University, and he directs the Centre for Global Political Economy. He is also the author of "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: A Reader’s Companion" (Verso, 2017) "Disassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism" (AK Press, 2013) and "Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers and the Political Economy of the American West" (UNC, 2007), which won the American Sociological Association’s Paul Sweezy Prize and the American Political Science Association’s Michael S. Harrington Award. "Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, co-authored with Joel Wainwright", will appear with Verso in January 2018.

Presented by

SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Reddit
SMS
Email
Copy

Stay Up to Date

Get the latest on upcoming events by subscribing to our newsletter below.