MAX CAM EVENT: “INVESTING IN VALUES” – TWO KEYNOTE SPEECHES

Bordering the surplus population across the Mediterranean: war, borders, and labour

Lucia Pradella, Kings College London

13.00-14.00, Tuesday 18 February

New Combination Room, Corpus Christi College

The military and the business of border control are two expanding investment sectors. But what is their link to the food we consume? And what do labour conditions in agriculture tell us about the nature of value and investment in the contemporary global economy? My paper discusses the impact of the NATO war on Libya and the externalization of EU borders in the Mediterranean upon the development of labour exploitation and unfree labour in the agricultural sector in southern Europe, looking in particular at the case of Italy. Focusing on the period between the 2007/8 crisis, the 2011 uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East and 2018, I trace the links between the pillaging of Libyan resources and the exploitation of immigrant workers in Libya and in Italian agriculture, as well as the role of the Italian state and Libyan state and non-state actors in containing and disciplining a reserve army of black African labour through a brutal system of detention, extortion and forced labour. This system both traps immigrants in Libya and pushes them towards Europe. Agri-business and retail corporations operating in Italy have benefitted from the import of cheap energy and vulnerable workers from Libya. Immigrants’ experiences of violence and forced labour in Libya can play a disciplining role when they arrive in Italy, but can also encourage them to mobilize and reclaim their collective rights. The paper concludes with a reflection on the role of war and borders in a new era of global revolt.

Material Political Economy

Donald MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh

19.00-20.00, Tuesday 18 February

McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College

‘Material political economy’ is a perspective on finance (and similar markets) that takes all three of those words seriously. It probes the material foundations of finance; examines the politics of those foundations (both in the actor-network theory sense of ‘material politics’ and in the effect on finance’s materiality of the interaction between finance and the political system); and is attentive to the economics of finance, especially to finance’s mundane money-making.

The main case that will be examined is automated, ultrafast high-frequency trading or HFT, but two other cases will be discussed more briefly: decentralised cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum; and online advertising, especially realtime bidding.