Slides from a political economy workshop held at the Spark, Phibsborough as part of Bohs Coop Scoil Bóihéamach series.
The title of these workshops is “Who Owns Ireland?” but on reflection I should have gone with “What Owns Ireland?” as the focus is very much on capitalism as a social system and its dynamics within Ireland. The “who” is almost immaterial; it is the “what” that matters.
The basic premise of the workshop is that mainstream bourgeois economics/political economy, particularly its highly conservative variant within Ireland, does not have the conceptual and analytical tools to fully interrogate the dynamics of capitalism in Ireland as a social system.
Unfortunately, this means that we have to almost “unlearn” a lot of the so-called common sense tools that are used on a daily basis in Irish public discussion and media to explain the various crises such as with housing and the cost of living.
The slides here are from the first workshop, where we do a lot of the heavy-lifting in terms of theory, but this serves a purpose as it lays the groundwork for next week’s workshop, which looks at Ireland as a case study.
