Via Paul Cockshott:
WARP - call for participation by progressive political economists
The week before last I was at the conferences of the World Association for Political Economy and the World Advanced Research Project both in Mexico City.
The bulk of the conference participants were from Asia and Latin America, with a huge participation by Chinese Political Economists. Some of the Chinese Political Economists seem convinced that the capitalist system is in terminal crisis and that the outcome will be to validate the superiority of market socialism.
I listened to very interesting papers by Enfu Cheng the head of the Chinese Academy of Social sciences on the different ideological tendancies in chinese political economy.
He identified neo liberalism, social democracy, confucian restorationism, new leftism, neo maoism, eclectic marxism, classical revisionism, and innovative marxism as the main schools of thought contending. The scholarship and breadth of knowledge of the world situation and the trends in Western thought, including Marxist ones, shown by the Chinese was impressive.
I want to draw the attention of the list participants to the Appeal issued by the World Advanced Research Project on their web page which has just been launched in multiple languages:
http://warp.puk.de/en/ English
http://warp.puk.de/de/ German
http://warp.puk.de/es/ Spanish
The project aims to create a virtual community that will engage in scientific research on the problems of transition out of the current world crisis. The aim is to have working groups working on definite projects with the aim of producing reports and analysis that can be of use to progressive governments and social movements.
In the light of the crisis in the Euro Zone one of the key objectives is to create a Europe wide econometric model that can be use to assess policy outcomes like the withdrawal of countries like Greece from the Euro.
We have the advantage that an initial parametrisable model is being made available to us by Klaus Bartsch who has a lot of expertise of modeling the German economy. This model can he claims, be tailored fairly rapidly to any capitalist economy. His full German model has some 800 equations but the skeleton one that he is makeing available has some 100 equations.
That is one of the reasearch groups that I am most keen to get participants for from European countries other than Germany, but there is no reason why we could not extent this to other places like North America if we can get willing participants.
The initial list of reasearch groups agreed by representatives from Europe, Latin America and China is listed on the web page at: http://warp.puk.de/es/component/zoo/item/das.html?Itemid=146
I may add that the whole programme has the backing of and participation from the Chinese Academy of Marxism and from the new Center for Transition Studies set up by the UAM in Mexico.
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