Date: 29 April 2015
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker: Photis Lysandrou
Talk Title: 'The Colonisation of the Future: An Alternative View of Financialisation and its Portents’’
Location: Ramsden Room, St Catharine's College
Speaker
Photis Lysandrou is Research Fellow, Political Economy Research Centre, City University (CITYPERC) and Associate Professor of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies. His current research interests are in the areas of global finance, globalisation and corporate governance.
Talk Overview:
Photis Lysandrou will contest the general heterodox view of financialisation as a dysfunctional and historically transient outgrowth of contemporary capitalism: dysfunctional because it is seen to be driven by attempts to escape production and profit realisation constraints in the real economy, transient because these attempts are seen to be ultimately futile. He will put the contrary argument that financialisation is a functionally necessary and thus permanent condition of capitalism that is entirely in keeping with the latter’s continuing development as a commodity system. To be specific, Photis Lysandrou will argue that just as globalisation represents the extension of the commodity principle along the axis of geographical space financialisation represents the extension of this same principle along the axis of time: the future is being colonised so as to make it take the overspill of the pressures on organisations operating in the present.