3rd GAPE Lecture 2026: Global Capitalism in Transition: the Dialectic of Socio-Economic Transformations

On Wednseday, 17 June at 17:00, the third GAPE lecture for 2026 will take place and will be co-organized with the Social Policy Lab of Panteion University. The invited speaker will be Grigory Sergeev, Research Fellow at Lomonosov Moscow State University and the title of the lecture is: Global Capitalism in Transition: the Dialectic of Socio-Economic Transformations. The lecture will be held online via Zoom at the following link:

https://upatras-gr.zoom.us/j/97240598526?pwd=IfCCo3K5dxtawbMGma0u7iEaGc9qmR.1

The abstract of the presentation follows:

The author examines the transition to post-capitalism based on the theory and methodology of Tsagolov school of political economy and Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism, which both inherited and developed Lenin’s theory of imperialism. The evolution of the capitalist mode of production at its descending stage (‘late capitalism’) introduces foreign elements into the economic system that have common forms with both the predictable communist mode of production and pre-bourgeois socio-economic systems, namely feudalism. The genesis and development of these elements are forced by the dominant position of monopoly capital in the socio-economic system of late capitalism. On the one hand, the process of socialization of production leads to the formation and development of transitional economic forms that undermine the initial capitalist relation and replace commodity production with relations of planning, which, in accordance with the hypothesis of Tsagolov school, are the initial relation of the post-capitalist system. On the other hand, the exorbitant influence of monopoly capital on relations of production, including various mechanisms of non-economic coercion and violence, undermines the basic capitalist relation due to the deformation of the mechanism of capitalist exploitation: the process of appropriation of surplus value is being replaced by appropriation of rent, which is typical for the feudal mode of production, not for capitalism. As a result, the relations of the late capitalism are gradually being transformed into a hybrid (or ‘mutant’) socio-economic system based on a contradictory combination of elements of a planned form of social production with a predominantly feudal mode of appropriation. At the same time, the aggravation of the internal contradictions of late capitalism may also lead to a revolutionary leap beyond the system of capitalist relations of production when a single or a few territories together form an alternative socio-economic system. This will make a powerful reverse effect on the system of relations of production in the most developed capitalist countries, up to forced introduction of restrictions on the exploitation of labor by capital. In this respect, the author concludes that the emergence of social compromises in a form of the ‘welfare state’ concept in the middle of the 20th century was ultimately driven by external pressure from the world socialist system.