A Time and a Place for Everything

international | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Monday November 17, 2008 23:05 by Paul - wsm (pers. cap.)

Talk on foundations of modern commodity money

This is a talk given by Dick Bryan from the University of Sydney at the recent Historical Materialism 2008 conference in London the weekend before last.

Bryan collaborated with Mike Rafferty to co-author the ground-breaking book "Capitalism and Derivatives" in 2006. One of the first books to properly examine the recent explosive developments in high finance from an anti-capitalist perspective, they have blazed a new path in investigating the hyper-evolution of current capitalist financial engineering that is at the root of the current crisis.

Despite the seeming impenetrability of the subject, Dick Bryan speaks clearly about the questions that recent mutations of capitalism and money pose for those of us whose aim is not to praise Caesar but to bury him. It's a challenging topic and the listener may well benefit from some background in the matter at hand. Nonetheless, when the dominant alternative is the stale recycling of received wisdoms by media commentators who clearly know nothing on the background to the current crisis, informed original thought is as rare and precious as iced water in the desert. I hope this can be of interest to the curious.

Recent talk by Dick Bryan at Historical Materialism Conference 2008
Recent talk by Dick Bryan at Historical Materialism Conference 2008 18.09 Mb