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Political Theory Colloquium

The Minnesota Political Theory Colloquium meets Fridays at 1:30 pm in the Lippincott Room, 1314 Social Sciences Building, unless otherwise noted.

For nearly a decade, graduate students in the department of political science have put together a biweekly schedule of presentations relevant to political theory. Most commonly this is in the form of a paper presentation - the paper is posted online a few days beforehand, interested parties read it, the author presents the paper for 10-30 minutes, the audience asks questions, provides feedback, and offers suggestions. To offer some variety, roundtable discussions on a particular topic or forums around currents issues appear in the schedule as well. The colloquium meets roughly every other Friday at 1:30 pm, with discussion lasting typically until around 3:30pm. Snacks and beverages are provided. Presenters are grad students, department faculty, faculty from other cognate departments at the university, other local college faculty (Carleton, Macalester, St Olaf, Hamline, etc), and the occasional out-of-town guest. Past guests have included Ernesto Laclau, Amitai Etzioni, Wendy Brown, Bonnie Honig, and Nick Xenos.

2011 Minnesota Political Theory Colloquium

Theme: Capital and Crisis
Call for Papers and Participation

The world economy melts down like a Fukushima reactor. After small advances, African and Latin American growth is currently negative. In the First World, job loss in Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Iceland has hit all-time records, unknown since the inception of the euro. American public debt is a staggering 98% of its 2010 GDP, yet the wealthiest 2% own half of the world's assets. Public debt rises as astronomically as private wealth. Losses, not gains, are socialized. This is an economic crisis where the accumulation of Capital is unprecedented. Another marker is that the crisis takes place in conditions of record-breaking profits in oil, insurance, and financial industries. The private bonanza simply reaffirms that the reproduction of world capital is based on the international exploitation of labor. The public bailout of Wall Street was followed by an unparalleled attack on labor needs proper to the Lochner Era coupled with the stoppage in wage growth since the Reagan regime. Of global proportions, this crisis shows that it is not a simple and fleeting malfunction of Capital. Rather, the production and reproduction of crisis contradicts directly the myth of indefinite capitalist progress. Marx noted that in the circulation of commodities, "their oneness assert itself by producing -a crisis". Capital by its own ever-expanding logic of accumulation and expansion is a system prone to crisis, actualized in crisis, and developed through crisis - its flaunted "creative destruction". Thus, "externalities" like financial wrecks, world poverty, ecological catastrophes, and global wars are not exceptional. They become norms, new "equilibriums" internal to capitalist development. These events mold the ongoing state of affairs and are normalized into the historical chain of being. At the same time, these events are indexes and imperatives of unaccountable power, uneven development, predation of the world's resources through investment, unequal trade, and military might in its current prerogatives: counter-terrorism and humanitarianism. Our current normalization of crisis obscures a normative apparatus that allows and disallows action and reaction, movement and resistance to these pressures. Thus, we have to address liberal capitalism multi-dimensionally. Are its norms, institutions, and markets one with this normalization of crisis?

Neoliberalism has accentuated the dependence and vulnerability of national economies to the vicissitudes of world capitalism. The epicenter is the United States, but its global effects show how different regional and national paths of capitalist accumulation are related to dynamics of social (class) struggle. The intensity of the crisis and its social responses differ from one country to another and tells, to a great extent, about current states of civic consciousness, politicization and depoliticization. This relation between economic ruptures and social power provides venues to start thinking of possible political exits and alternatives to the current conjuncture. With money, power becomes private and unaccountable. What are the prospects for political power and the public sphere with such unseen accumulation of private wealth? How is this crisis thought in terms of dynamics of political power and its changing political forms?

It is the theme of this year's political theory colloquium to explore the fundamental relation of capital with crisis, the structural embeddedness of crisis with the production, circulation and expansion of contemporary Capital. Though this ongoing colloquium is committed to the work of political theory, submissions from a variety of disciplines are encouraged. We are interested in papers across various disciplines that broadly theorize the object of Capital and the crises it unleashes in historical and contextual specificity.

For more information about either presenting at or attending the colloquium, please contact Sergio Valverde (valve002@umn.edu) or David Temin (temin002@umn.edu)

Possible topics might include, though are not necessarily limited to:

  • Political economy
  • Labor politics
  • Imperialism and neocolonialism
  • Crisis Theory
  • Late Capitalism
  • Neoliberalism
  • State theories
  • Elite theories
  • Marxism
  • Exploitation theories
  • Anti-capitalist movements
  • Socialist politics
  • Right-Wing politics
  • Capital and class
  • Post-politics and depoliticization
  • Working class and proletariat studies
  • Theories of value
  • Historical materialism
  • Cultural politics
  • Security theories