Department of Economics, John Jay College, CUNY

Clara Mattei: The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism
2024-10-16 13:40 - 15:00 UTC | 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.”

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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