Department of Economics, John Jay College, CUNY

Güney Işıkara: Marx's Value Theory at the Frontiers
2026-03-19 13:30 - 15:00 UTC | Room L.76
Professor Işıkara (New York University) will present research from his recent book, Marx’s Value Theory at the Frontiers (2026), relating political economy to the topics of imperialism and ecological breakdown.

The John Jay-New School Conference on Contemporary Political Economy
2026-02-27 08:00 - 2026-02-28 18:00 | John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street
This new conference is a collaborative initiative aimed at sustaining and strengthening critical political economy scholarship. While URPE has traditionally organized panels at the Eastern Economic Association’s annual conference (URPE@Easterns) alongside other organized streams in political economy, the EEA’s 2026 meeting—scheduled to take place in the Dominican Republic in May—presents a number of challenges to many who frequently participate in the our February meetings, including for those who rely on staying with friends or colleagues in the conference city to meet total conference costs.
In response, faculty at John Jay College and the New School for Social Research, in collaboration with colleagues from several other institutions and with the support of URPE, are organizing a two-day conference as an alternative forum. As with URPE@Easterns, the objective is to foster rigorous and critical dialogue among scholars across the heterodox spectrum. The event is not limited to URPE members: participation is open to all scholars working within the tradition of critical political economy.
Registration link: https://forms.gle/J6Y3BCwSj2M6zMxR8
PANELISTS: If you are using slides in your panel, please email your slide deck as an attachment (not a link) by Wednesday February 25th to: URPEjohnjay2026@gmail.com
Detailed Conference Program (Updated 2/27)
Schedule

Friday
February 27th, 2026
Location:

Registration Begins 8:00am

524 West 59th Street. New York, NY

8:00am
Welcome Coffee and Pastries
Room L.61

8:30 – 9:20
Panel Session 1

9:35 -10:55
Panel Session 2

11:10 – 12:55
Panel Session 3

12:55- 2:00
Lunch Break

2:00 – 3:45
Panel Session 4

4:00 – 5:45
Panel Session 5

6:00pm
Conference Happy Hour at Gossip Bar
733 Ninth Ave, New York, NY

Saturday
February 28th, 2026
Location:

Registration Begins 8:00am

524 West 59th Street. New York, NY

8:00am
Welcome Coffee and Pastries
Room L.61

8:30 – 9:20
Panel Session 1

9:35 -10:55
Panel Session 2

11:10 – 12:55
Panel Session 3

12:55- 2:00
Lunch Break

2:00 – 3:45
Panel Session 4

4:00 – 5:45
Panel Session 5

6:00pm
LGBTQ+ Happy Hour at Gossip Bar
733 Ninth Ave, New York, NY

While this event is taking place at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, please note that the comments, views, and opinions expressed in this program are solely those of the speaker(s) and do not reflect or represent the views of the college. The location of the event should not be considered and does not imply an endorsement of the viewpoints presented during the program.

Chris Hughes
2025-11-17 13:30 - 15:00
Details TBA

Justin McBrien
2025-11-13 13:30 - 15:00

Olufemi Taiwo
2025-11-11 13:30 - 15:00

Yakov Feygin
2025-11-03 13:30 - 15:00
Details TBA.

Alex Vitale. "Mamdani and Public Safety: Charting a New Path"
2025-10-16 13:30 - 15:00 | Room L2.85, John Jay College 524 West 59th Street
Prof. Alex Vitale will discuss the Mamdani campaign’s proposal to create a new Department of Community Safety to address a wide variety of public safety concerns independently of the NYPD. Over 50 cities have created similar departments or offices, and the results have been very positive. What will it take to get such a Department established and what kinds of jobs will be created in the process?

Rick Wolff, Laura Flanders, Chris Hedges, Cornel West. It's Time…
2025-10-09 18:00 - 20:00 | L.63 NB
It’s Time…For Big, Beautiful, Basic Change
Presented in collaboration with Democracy at Work. Don’t miss this opportunity to gather, explore, organize, and implement a big, beautiful, basic change. Join us for a conference-style plenary discussion and Q&A by some of the greatest minds of our time on what needs to be done now, before it’s too late.

Nathan Tankus. The Federal Reserve Under Trump: A Unitary Executive Crisis
2025-09-29 13:30 - 15:00 | L2.84 NB
From the first day Trump was sworn into office for his second presidential administration, administrative agencies have been under attack. These attacks have been a mixture of the longstanding agendas of far right think tanks who have disdain for the administrative state and big tech’s technological agenda. The legal core of this assault is the theory of the “unitary executive”- the idea that the executive branch is under the direct and personal control of the president rather than filled with a multitude of agencies with varying degrees of discretion and ability to make decisions independently of the White House.
A long standing tension for far right legal theorists has been the place of the Federal Reserve in their legal theories. Economists have their own ad-hoc amateur theory of administrative law- known as “central bank independence”. How could an “independent” Federal Reserve survive the unitary executive theory’s elimination of independent agencies? In Trump V. Wilcox, the Supreme Court hinted at a squaring of this circle by declaring a “unitary executive- except for the Fed” solution. Recently, the Trump administration has raised the stakes by attempting to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. As of this writing, Lisa Cook is still in her position while her case is being appealed to the supreme court.
What are the stakes of a Federal Reserve fully under the control of Donald Trump? While mainstream commentators focus on interest rate policy, the stakes are quite a bit larger. From budgetary policy to credit policy, the potential for abuse is enormous and not well understood. After introducing the state of play, the rest of the talk will focus on the less understood potential mechanisms for abuse and draw larger conclusions for what these mechanisms tell us about the nature of the Federal Reserve.

Is There Life on Marx? Capital as a theory of exploitation and as a theory of crisis
2025-02-03 16:00 - 18:00 | Haaren Hall Room 335
With Riccardo Bellofiore, Former Professor of Political Economy at the University of Bergamo (Italy)
The seminar will present a quick overview of the content of Capital, showing that it is at the same time a theory of impersonal domination and of class domination in capitalism. In the argument money is a constituent of value and production is nothing but the consumption of the living bearers of labour power. Capitalist production needs finance as an ante-validation of firms’ choices about production, and the new value extracted depends from class struggle in production and it is driven by effective demand. Value theory is at the same theory a theory of crisis: the tendential fall in the rate of profit is reinterpreted as encompassing within itself the counter-tendencies contrasting it. This perspective is prolonged into a historical sketch of the long dynamics of capital encompassing the major great ‘structural’ crises

Is Democracy Possible Under Capitalism? Roundtable with Richard Wolff
2024-11-14 18:00 - 20:00 | John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street
A roundtable with Rick Wolff and friends reflecting on the recent elections in the US and looking beyond elections.

Francesca Albanese. "Human Rights in Times of Genocide"
2024-10-31 16:30 - 18:00 | L.63 NB

Kirstin Munro. Ordinary Business: Mundane Economics and the Production of Everyday Life
2024-10-28 13:30 - 15:00 | John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street
Kirstin Munro is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research. Based on qualitative interviews with sustainability-oriented parents of young children, Munro’s Production of Everyday Life in Eco-Conscious Households: Compromise, Conflict, Complicity describes what happens when people make interventions into mundane and easy-to-overlook aspects of everyday life to bring the way they get things done into alignment with their environmental values. Because the ability to make changes is constrained by their culture and capitalist society, there are negative consequences and trade-offs involved in these household-level sustainability practices. The households described in this book shed light on the full extent of the trade-offs involved in promoting sustainability at the household level as a solution to environmental problems.

Clara Mattei: The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism
2024-10-16 13:40 - 15:00 | L2.84 NB
“In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.
Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies “succeeded,” relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism.”

Yonit Manor-Percival. Post-Colonial Globalization: Law, Power, and Actors in the 21st Century
2024-09-25 13:30 - 15:00 | John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street
Yonit Manor-Percival is a solicitor of England and Wales who lectures at the Centre of Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London and is a research associate at SOAS. Her main research interests are in international law, foreign investment law and the interface between national and international law, society and corporations within the framework of globalized capitalism’s political economy. The book uses the prism of the law to reflect on three interrelated themes. One is the act of taking, the second is capitalist private property and the third is enclosures.

Benjamin Barson. Concert and Book Launch: Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons
2024-09-23 13:30 - 15:00 | Room 9.64 NB, John Jay College 524 West 59th Street
Join us to celebrate the launch of Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons. This book recasts the birth of jazz, and unearths vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Black brass bands rehearsed participatory democracy through collective performance, and their militant spirit embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction–“Brassroots Democracy.” Benjamin Barson presents a transnational “music history from below,” tracing how the families of prominent early jazz traversed New Orleans, Mexico, and Haiti, as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes.

Isabella Weber. Prices, Inflation, and Survival in an Age of Emergencies: Why We Need a New Paradigm
2024-09-11 19:00 - 21:00 | Moot Court 6.68 NB, 524 W 59th St, New York, New York, 10019
Part of our Economic Justice Speaker Series
Isabella M. Weber is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University, and a Fellow of the OSF Ideas Workshop. Her next book, ESSENTIAL: Inflation, Profits and Survival in an Age of Emergencies, will be published in 2026 by Penguin Allen Lane in the UK and University of Chicago Press in the US, and will be translated into seven languages.
Please RSVP here or use the QR code.

Summer Show with Speakers and Music
2024-06-08 14:00 - 20:00 | The People’s Garden, 1237 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY, 11221, United States
BYO Food to grill!
Speakers:
Mike Morgan (Hardcrackers)
Stephanie Attar (Borough of Manhattan Community College)
John Garvey (Hardcrackers)
Music:
Minaxi
Miriam Elhajli
Jonah Wolf
Light Sweet Crude
Will Moloney
The Lorraines

Student Conference
2024-05-10 10:00 - 16:00 | John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street
[10am-11am] Breakfast (Haaren Hall 336)
[11am-1pm] Presentations
[1pm-2pm] Lunch (Haaren Hall 336)
[2pm-4pm] Presentations
[4pm] Food and Party (Haaren Hall 336)
Paper topics and room numbers can be found in the conference program.

Gerald Epstein. Busting the Bankers' Club: Finance for the Rest of Us
2024-04-10 13:40 - 15:00 | Room L2.85, John Jay College 524 West 59th Street
Gerald Epstein is Professor of Economics and a Founding Codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The Political Economy of Central Banking: Contested Control and the Power of Finance. His new book, Busting the Bankers’ Club, recently published by the University of California Press documents the promises and roadblocks of reforming our broken and unfair financial system.

Power for a Just Transition
2024-03-30 09:00 - 17:30 | John Jay College, 524 West 59th Street
Using Law and Political Economy as a guiding framework, this workshop will host emerging scholarship in conversation with academics and policymakers, working to identify innovative methods of analysis from law, economics, sociology, or policy that can interrogate and combat hegemonic and capitalist power.
Featuring keynote speakers Kate Aronoff (Writer for New Republic) and Isabel Estevez (Deputy Director of Industrial Policy and Trade at the Roosevelt Institute), this workshop will provide a specific lens on climate policy, addressing crucial questions about public intervention, industrial policy, and democratic governance in the face of climate catastrophe and authoritarian capitalism.
The event will also host a roundtable discussion on regulation, state action, and governance featuring Clara Mattei (New School), An Li (Sarah Lawrence), JW Mason (John Jay), and Jamee Moudud (Sarah Lawrence) moderated by Martha McCluskey (University of Buffalo).
Attendance is free and breakfast and lunch will be served complimentary for all conference attendees.
Register at
BIT.LY/APPEAL-SPRING24

Michael Heinrich. "Today's Political Value of Marx's Theory of Value"
2024-03-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Room 9.64 NB, John Jay College 524 West 59th Street
Michael Heinrich is a German historian of philosophy, political scientist, and mathematician, specializing in the critical study of the development of Marx’s thought. He has written in depth on Marx’s critique of political economy in his book, The Science of Value. His An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital is probably the most popular introduction to Marx’s economic works in Germany.
