Lecture
SPEAKERS:Thomas Reifer ( University of San Diego)
Beverly Silver (Director, Giovanni Arrighi center fro Global Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore)
Dr. Tom Reifer is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of San Diego, where he was formerly the co-director of the Gender Studies Program, and an Associate at USD’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice. Dr. Reifer has also been a long-time Research Associate at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems at Civilizations at the State University of New York (SUNY) Binghamton, and the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside, of which he was formerly Associate Director and with which he continues to collaborate. Dr. Reifer is also an Associate Fellow at the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, an international fellowship of committed scholar activists; and was formerly a Senior Research Associate at Focus on the Global South, based in Asia.
Dr. Reifer is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, co-authored and edited collections on questions of the global economy, geopolitics, and related issues of peace and justice, including “Capital’s Cartographer: Giovanni Arrighi, 1937-2009,” in New Left Review.”
Beverly J. Silver is Professor of Sociology and founder and Director of the Arrighi Center for Global Studies at the Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA). She has written widely on the historical dynamics of global capitalism. Her book, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870, has been translated into eleven languages and has won several major awards including the Distinguished Publication Award of the American Sociological Association. She worked closely for almost three decades with the late Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009), co-authoring numerous publications with him, including Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System and “The End of the Long Twentieth Century”. Silver was awarded a Mellon Foundation grant to organize a Sawyer Seminar (2012-2015) on the theme of “Capitalism in Crisis, Capitalism in Transition”.
Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009) is one of the pioneers of World Systems analysis and more recently one of the most cited and influential thinkers on the fate of US hegemony and the direction of world politics and economy. His world-spanning analysis allowed him to grasp that while the crisis of the 70s was a sign of fading US hegemony, it is only the current crisis, which has followed the Clinton-era belle époque fin de siècle that signals the definitive end of US dominance in the world. Arrighi made very clear that it means that whatever comes next it cannot be what we have just had for the last decades, nor even what has been the case for the past century or even two. Western hegemony as such is over, and among the contending economic approaches, the self-regulated free market, with unlimited growth and concern only for profit is almost certainly no longer among the contenders. So the two main foundations of modern “civilization” – western dominance and the global free market based on unlimited profit-seeking are finished.