Guest lecture by Professor Emeritus Elmar Altvater

The recent fiscal crisis has accentuated discussions on the character and role of crisis in modern capitalism. Marxist understandings of crisis as inherent in the capitalist economic system has long been seen as outdated and belonging to last century. But the effects and persistence of the recent crisis has resulted in a new interest in the role and function of crisis. Modern capitalism has certainly changed from the capitalism of the day’s of Marx and new challenges has surfaced, but crisis as a key mechanism in capitalism has surfaced once again and shown to be a overwelming challenge to the political regulatory system.

Elmar Altvater was Professor of Political Science at the Otto-Suhr-Institute of the Free University of Berlin, before retiring in 2004. He continues to work at the Institute, and to publish articles and books.

At the Otto-Suhr-Institute, he was active in socialist research groups, working with among others Klaus Busch, Wolfgang Schoeller and Frank Seelow, and he gained fame as one of Germany's most important Marxist philosophers, who strongly influenced the political and economic theory of the 1968 generation of radicals. His analysis, centered around the logic of capital accumulation crisis in state interventions is key to the Marxist theory of "state-derivationism."

In 1970, he co-founded the German journal "PROKLA - Journal for Critical Social Science" of which he remains an editor. In 1971 he became university professor in political economy at the Otto-Suhr-Institute. Apart from questions of development theory, the debt crisis, and the regulation of markets, he remains preoccupied with the effects of capitalist economies on the environment.

In the 70ties Altvater worked with the Danish Marxist Journal Kurasje, and visited Copenhagen a number of times.
Altvater is a renowned critic of "political economy" and author of numerous writings on globalization and critiques of capitalism. A standard work is his book The Limits of Globalization (1996), written with his companion Birgit Mahnkopf.