Michael Perelman is a professor of economics at California State University, Chico. He is an American economist and economic historian and writes extensively in criticism of conventional or mainstream economics. Perelman has written 19 books, including Railroading Economics, Manufacturing Discontent, The Perverse Economy, and The Invention of Capitalism. His latest project is, The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Control Undermines the Economy by Stunting Workers, under contract with Stanford University Press. The basic theme is the way that capitalism is structured to be incapable of efficiently managing the labor process and that capitalism’s efforts to control the labor process create serious social and economic damage.

This event is part of “The Origins of Civil Society” organized by the Crisis in the Cultures of Capitalism Research Cluster. The development of the discipline of political economy, including its dialogue with modern political philosophy, is closely intertwined with the rise and expansion of capitalist society. As we turn our attention today to capitalism’s crisis tendencies and the future of market society, a critical examination of this foundational history becomes the starting point of the analysis of the present. This lecture series addresses the origins of civil society from several vantage points: the legal and political forms that underlie market relations; the transformation of the labor process; the role of gender and reproductive labor; and the history of separation from the means of subsistence.

Additional events in this series:

Jan 16, 2014 – Warren Montag: “The Revocation of the Right to Subsistence: On the Legal and Political Origins of the Market”
Feb 6, 2014 – Kathi Weeks: “The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries”

Presented by the Crisis in the Cultures of Capitalism Research Cluster.Staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research. For more information, including disabled access, please contact Evin Guy: (831) 459-5655, ecguy@ucsc.edu. Maps: http://maps.ucsc.edu.