Lectures
Martin O'Neill
Martin O'Neill is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of York. He works on social justice and inequality, and on various issues at the intersection of political philosophy, political economy, and public policy.
Martin has published in journals such as Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Journal of Social Philosophy. He is co-editor of Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and of Taxation and Political Philosophy (OUP, forthcoming).
Martin has published in journals such as Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Journal of Social Philosophy. He is co-editor of Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), and of Taxation and Political Philosophy (OUP, forthcoming).
Lectures by Martin O'Neill
Day 1 - July 15: The Meidner Approach to Rewiring Work: the Case for Collective Capital Institutions (co-authored paper with Markus Furendal)
Thomas Piketty's empirical work has shown that over time the returns to different factors of production are likely increasingly to favour the owners of capital over those who earn their income through selling their labour. The question therefore arises as to what kinds of economic institutions can socialise increasing returns to capital, so that this shift in factor shares does not continue to accelerate overall income inequality. This article examines the case for at least a partial solution to this problem via the exploration of a road not taken: development of the kind of 'wage-earner funds' that were initially proposed by Rudolf Meidner in the 1970, and which have recently come to be viewed as a potential institutional suggestion by democratic socialists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Day 3 - July 17: Justice, Power, and Participatory Socialism: On Piketty's Capital and Ideology
Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology constitutes a landmark achievement in furthering our understanding of the history of inequality, and presents valuable proposals for constructing a future economic system that would allow us to transcend and move beyond contemporary forms of capitalism. In my lecture I discuss Piketty’s conceptions of ideology, property, and ‘inequality regimes’, and analys his approach to social justice and its relation to the work of John Rawls. I examine how Piketty’s proposals for ‘participatory socialism’ would function not only to redistribute income and wealth, but also to disperse economic power within society, and I discuss the complementary roles of redistribution and predistribution in his proposals, and Piketty’s place in a tradition of egalitarian political economy associated with James Meade and Anthony Atkinson. Having elaborated on Piketty’s account of the relationship between economic policy and ideational change, and his important idea of the ‘desacralization’ of private property, I de- velop ‘seven theses’ on his proposals for participatory socialism, examining areas in which his approach could be enhanced or extended, so as to create a viable twenty-first century version of democratic socialism.
Day 1 - July 15: The Meidner Approach to Rewiring Work: the Case for Collective Capital Institutions (co-authored paper with Markus Furendal)
Thomas Piketty's empirical work has shown that over time the returns to different factors of production are likely increasingly to favour the owners of capital over those who earn their income through selling their labour. The question therefore arises as to what kinds of economic institutions can socialise increasing returns to capital, so that this shift in factor shares does not continue to accelerate overall income inequality. This article examines the case for at least a partial solution to this problem via the exploration of a road not taken: development of the kind of 'wage-earner funds' that were initially proposed by Rudolf Meidner in the 1970, and which have recently come to be viewed as a potential institutional suggestion by democratic socialists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Day 3 - July 17: Justice, Power, and Participatory Socialism: On Piketty's Capital and Ideology
Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology constitutes a landmark achievement in furthering our understanding of the history of inequality, and presents valuable proposals for constructing a future economic system that would allow us to transcend and move beyond contemporary forms of capitalism. In my lecture I discuss Piketty’s conceptions of ideology, property, and ‘inequality regimes’, and analys his approach to social justice and its relation to the work of John Rawls. I examine how Piketty’s proposals for ‘participatory socialism’ would function not only to redistribute income and wealth, but also to disperse economic power within society, and I discuss the complementary roles of redistribution and predistribution in his proposals, and Piketty’s place in a tradition of egalitarian political economy associated with James Meade and Anthony Atkinson. Having elaborated on Piketty’s account of the relationship between economic policy and ideational change, and his important idea of the ‘desacralization’ of private property, I de- velop ‘seven theses’ on his proposals for participatory socialism, examining areas in which his approach could be enhanced or extended, so as to create a viable twenty-first century version of democratic socialism.
Bruno Lamas
Bruno Lamas (1979), an architect by training, worked in the fields of urbanism and urban and regional planning between 2004 and 2017. He is currently a fellow of the F.C.T., the Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology, and a Ph.D. student in Economic and Organizational Sociology in UL-ISEG, Lisbon School of Economics and Management, developing the dissertation “The Metamorphoses of Modern Slavery: Labour, Self-ownership and the Problem of Slavery in the History of Capitalism.”
Lectures by Bruno Lamas
Day 2 - July 16: “Worse than Exploitation: Superfluity and Expulsion in the Decomposition of Capitalism”
Karl Marx uses the term “exploitation” with two distinct meanings: as a general abstraction, whose content is not entirely determined and which even today is often interpreted transhistorically or as a moral category; and a second meaning, developed in the works of his more mature phase dedicated to the critique of political economy, associated with the theoretical clarification of the social production of “surplus value”. Although much more precise, this second meaning is not entirely free from ambiguities, some of which have ended up being aggravated by successive interpretations that are based on a general or indeterminate notion of exploitation. In this lecture, at first, I will try to overcome these ambiguities around the concept of exploitation by highlighting some of the fundamental aspects of the Marxian critique of the capitalist social form, namely that capital is a contradictory form of “abstract wealth” (Marx), socially and historically specific to modern society, based on the undifferentiated combustion of human energy socially represented in the fetishistic forms of commodities and money. In a second moment, I would like to illustrate the disastrous effects of current objective tendencies of social superfluity and expulsion immanent to the historical trajectory of capitalism, considering one of the contemporary problems increasingly interpreted with a vague and moralistic notion of “exploitation”, the so-called “modern slavery”.
Day 2 - July 16: “Worse than Exploitation: Superfluity and Expulsion in the Decomposition of Capitalism”
Karl Marx uses the term “exploitation” with two distinct meanings: as a general abstraction, whose content is not entirely determined and which even today is often interpreted transhistorically or as a moral category; and a second meaning, developed in the works of his more mature phase dedicated to the critique of political economy, associated with the theoretical clarification of the social production of “surplus value”. Although much more precise, this second meaning is not entirely free from ambiguities, some of which have ended up being aggravated by successive interpretations that are based on a general or indeterminate notion of exploitation. In this lecture, at first, I will try to overcome these ambiguities around the concept of exploitation by highlighting some of the fundamental aspects of the Marxian critique of the capitalist social form, namely that capital is a contradictory form of “abstract wealth” (Marx), socially and historically specific to modern society, based on the undifferentiated combustion of human energy socially represented in the fetishistic forms of commodities and money. In a second moment, I would like to illustrate the disastrous effects of current objective tendencies of social superfluity and expulsion immanent to the historical trajectory of capitalism, considering one of the contemporary problems increasingly interpreted with a vague and moralistic notion of “exploitation”, the so-called “modern slavery”.
Katharina Pistor
Katharina Pistor is a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions. Pistor is the author or co-author of nine books. Her most recent book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality examines how assets such as land, private debt, business organizations, or knowledge are transformed into capital through contract law, property rights, collateral law, and trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law.
Lectures by Katharina Pistor
Day 3 - July 17: Where is the State? Lesson from the Code of Capital
Capital, I argue in “The Code of Capital”, is coded in law. The legal coding ensure that holders of capital enjoy legally enforceable rights that give them a comparative advantage over others. This is the source of wealth, and because access to these coding strategies is uneven, also the cause for inequality. Law, not a personified state, is foregrounded in this story. Law derives its power from how societies configure access to the centralized means of coercion. This, I will argue is where one can locate, reform and reconfigure “the state”.
Suggested Readings
Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (2019) Princeton University Press
Katharina Pistor, "From Territorial to Monetary Sovereignty", Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Vol. 18, p. 491, 2017; Columbia Law School Centre for Law & Economic Studies Working Paper NO. 591 (2017). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2279
Alan Scott, "Capitalism, Weber and Democracy". Max Weber Studies, 1(1), 33-55. Retrieved July 12, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24579712
Day 3 - July 17: Where is the State? Lesson from the Code of Capital
Capital, I argue in “The Code of Capital”, is coded in law. The legal coding ensure that holders of capital enjoy legally enforceable rights that give them a comparative advantage over others. This is the source of wealth, and because access to these coding strategies is uneven, also the cause for inequality. Law, not a personified state, is foregrounded in this story. Law derives its power from how societies configure access to the centralized means of coercion. This, I will argue is where one can locate, reform and reconfigure “the state”.
Suggested Readings
Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (2019) Princeton University Press
Katharina Pistor, "From Territorial to Monetary Sovereignty", Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Vol. 18, p. 491, 2017; Columbia Law School Centre for Law & Economic Studies Working Paper NO. 591 (2017). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2279
Alan Scott, "Capitalism, Weber and Democracy". Max Weber Studies, 1(1), 33-55. Retrieved July 12, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24579712
Nicholas Vrousalis
Nicholas Vrousalis is Associate Professor at the Erasmus School of Philosophy of Erasmus University Rotterdam. He read economics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he received the Harcourt Prize in Economics. He subsequently migrated to political philosophy, receiving a doctorate from Oxford, where he was supervised by G.A. Cohen.
Before coming to Rotterdam, Vrousalis taught moral and political philosophy at Cambridge, as a University Lecturer, at Leiden, as Assistant Professor, and at KU Leuven, as a Postdoctoral Fellow. He has held fellowships at UC Louvain, as an ARC Fellow, at Princeton University, where he was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow, and at Aarhus University, where he held a EURIAS/COFUND Fellowship. Vrousalis’ research focuses on distributive ethics, democratic theory, and the history of political thought, with emphasis on Kant, Hegel, and Marx. |
Lectures by Nicholas Vrousalis
Day 1 - July 15: Exploitation as Domination
This paper argues that domination is violation of the requirements of rightful individual freedom: subjection of purposiveness to the choices of others. Applied to work, such subjection entails unjust unilateral control over the productive purposiveness of others. The paper introduces the Non-Servitude Proviso, which grounds the subjected-purposiveness idea on a number of possible justifications: Kantian, republican, and recognitional. Exploitation is what happens when unilateral control over labour translates into unreciprocated labour flow. The paper applies the Proviso to capital with the help of a simple economic model and discusses its implications for ‘clean’ capitalist accumulation. Capital, I argue, is monetized title to unilateral control over the labour of others.
Day 2 - July 16: What is Structural Domination
This paper draws upon the feminist and republican literature to argue for the cogency of the idea of structural domination. It then applies that idea to capitalist economic structure. The paper defends a definition of structural domination as regulated domination: any given instance of domination is structural just when it involves a triadic relation between dominator, dominated and regulator—any social role or norm that contributes non-contingently to the reproduction of the dominator-dominated dyad. The paper then illustrates two general ways in which capitalist transactions manifest structural exploitation. The first involves vertical authority relations between capitalists and workers—the standard labour-market case. The second involves horizontal market relations between workers in different (and possibly democratic) firms. These two cases illustrate the difference between a hired and an unhired servitude, the dividends to which constitute exploitation.
Suggested Readings
Nicholas Vrousalis, "Socialism Unrevised: A Reply to Roemer on Marx, Exploitation, Solidarity, Worker Control", Philosophy & Public Affairs, 49, 1, Winter 2021: 78-109. Access: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/papa.12183
Day 1 - July 15: Exploitation as Domination
This paper argues that domination is violation of the requirements of rightful individual freedom: subjection of purposiveness to the choices of others. Applied to work, such subjection entails unjust unilateral control over the productive purposiveness of others. The paper introduces the Non-Servitude Proviso, which grounds the subjected-purposiveness idea on a number of possible justifications: Kantian, republican, and recognitional. Exploitation is what happens when unilateral control over labour translates into unreciprocated labour flow. The paper applies the Proviso to capital with the help of a simple economic model and discusses its implications for ‘clean’ capitalist accumulation. Capital, I argue, is monetized title to unilateral control over the labour of others.
Day 2 - July 16: What is Structural Domination
This paper draws upon the feminist and republican literature to argue for the cogency of the idea of structural domination. It then applies that idea to capitalist economic structure. The paper defends a definition of structural domination as regulated domination: any given instance of domination is structural just when it involves a triadic relation between dominator, dominated and regulator—any social role or norm that contributes non-contingently to the reproduction of the dominator-dominated dyad. The paper then illustrates two general ways in which capitalist transactions manifest structural exploitation. The first involves vertical authority relations between capitalists and workers—the standard labour-market case. The second involves horizontal market relations between workers in different (and possibly democratic) firms. These two cases illustrate the difference between a hired and an unhired servitude, the dividends to which constitute exploitation.
Suggested Readings
Nicholas Vrousalis, "Socialism Unrevised: A Reply to Roemer on Marx, Exploitation, Solidarity, Worker Control", Philosophy & Public Affairs, 49, 1, Winter 2021: 78-109. Access: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/papa.12183