Category: Economy
(Delivered on October 22nd in the Economics Faculty, Humboldt University, Berlin as the Hermann Otto Hirschfeld lecture for 2015. With profound thanks to Prof. Rolf Schieder for his role in organizing this event.) Religion belongs to a set of terms that also includes art and science. Science began as a form of knowledge opposed to […]
Ryan Anderson: Earlier you referred to OA as “a strategy of resistance to privatization of the commons”. Can you elaborate on that point? Keith Hart: I meant that private property is still the great unresolved contradiction of modern society, not least because its ubiquity often makes society invisible. For Rousseau, the invention of private property […]
New Preface to Carlos Alba Vega and Gustavo Lins Ribeiro editors Globalization from Below: The world’s other economy (Spanish edition, Mexico City, 2015) Contents: 1. The great transformation 2. Globalization from above 3. Globalization from below (and above) 4. The informal economy has taken over the world 5. The digital revolution and intellectual property 6. […]
“The informalization of the world economy”, keynote lecture for the 24th Conference of the Societa’ Italiana di Economia Pubblica: “Informal economy, tax evasion and corruption”, Pavia, 24-25 September 2012 A la recherche du temps perdu The idea of an informal economy was born at the moment when the post-war era of developmental states was drawing […]
This is a more polished and hopefully accessible version of the essay below. Go to openDemocracy for the link here.
The story about voting giving the people democratic power is an example of the cover-up that passes for education at every level in our societies. Politicians need money and money men need political cover. Central banking was invented to institutionalize their partnership. The Bank of England, Banque de France and Federal Reserve are all private […]
International Study Day Anthropology of the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism 3 mai 2011, 10h-17h, musée du quai Branly, 37 Quai Branly, 75007 Paris, Cinema Theater Convened by Jonathan Friedman (IRIS/EHESS) & Laurent Berger (LAS/MQB) Programme 10h-10h15 Jonathan Friedman (IRIS-EHESS) & Laurent Berger (LAS-MQB) « Introduction: Towards an anthropology of the crisis in capitalism » 10h15-11h Paul Jorion […]
There is no doubt that my life was transformed by the two and a half years I spent in Ghana, 1965-68, much of it doing ‘fieldwork’ in a slum of the capital city Accra. Writing a doctoral thesis was straightforward enough, although I felt I had to disguise my own participation in what I described. […]
Phil Swift’s brilliant post on the relevance of Henry Mayhew’s 19th century investigations of London’s working classes for a politicized ethnography today has set off many reverberations inside my skull. One issue is the relationship between Mayhew’s project and Marx’s. Both are highly critical of the social causes of the condition of the working class, […]
At the height of the credit boom, three Icelandic banks built up a huge trade by offering higher interest rates on deposits in Britain especially, but also in some other European countries, notably the Netherlands. At one time these banks had liabilities much larger than Iceland’s GNP. Their owners bought football clubs and the like. […]
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
