Elmar Altvater
Elmar Altvater ( born August 24, 1938 in Kamen ) is a German political scientist, author and professor emeritus of political science at the Otto Suhr Institute of the Free University of Berlin. After the retirement on 30 September 2004 Altvater is still active in research and teaching at the Institute. He is also a member of the scientific advisory board of Attac, and he was in the 2006 Chairman of the Permanent People's Tribunal against European transnational companies.
Life
After graduation in 1959 at the Modern Languages School in Kamen Altvater studied until 1963 at the Ludwig- Maximilians- University of Munich economics and sociology, and was founded in 1968 with his work on social production and economic rationality: PhD externalities and central planning in the economic system of socialism. From 1968 to 1970 he was a research assistant at the University of Erlangen- Nuremberg.
Altvater then moved to the Otto -Suhr- Institute ( OSI) of Political Science at the Free University of Berlin. Here he received in 1971 a professorship of Political Economy. Altvater dedicated to the OSI in the " Socialist assistant cell", a think-tank of the '68 movement in Berlin.
In 1970 he co-founded a proclamation problems of the class struggle - Journal of political economy and socialist policies, later Journal for Critical Social Science, where he was until 2008 the editorial board.
Altvater contributed significantly to the development of a Marxist-inspired political-economic theory. He was active as a member of the SDS- 68 movement and one of the theoretical heads of Socialist offices in Offenbach.
In addition to issues of development theory, the debt and the regulation of markets, he also deals extensively with the effects of capitalist economies on the environment. Altvater is a renowned critic of the " political economy " and the author of numerous globalization and capitalism critical writings. A otherglobalist standard work is his book Limits of Globalization ( 1996), which he wrote with his partner Birgit Mahnkopf.
In parallel to his academic work, Altvater was socio-politically active again. He was a founding member of the Green Party, but went after the Kosovo war increasingly at a distance.
Elmar Altvater was a member of the Commission of Inquiry Globalization of the World Economy - Challenges and Answers (1999-2002) of the German Bundestag. Today he campaigns for attac ( Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee) and the World Social Forum. A few days before the G8 summit in Heiligendamm in 2007 Altvater joined the left. Altvater is a founding member of the Institute Solidary modernity.
Work
The occasion for his published in 2005 book The End of Capitalism as we know it formed a set of the Mexican sociologist Pablo González Casanova in 2004 initiated discussion about the "end of capitalism " and the 2005 emergence of so-called "locusts debate" in Germany. Altvater want to practice in this work is not only a "radical critique of capitalism ", but - contrary to Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the " end of history" - " beyond capitalism " think and develop alternatives to it.
The author assumes of Fernand Braudel, the basic assumption that capitalism " can not perish by an endogenous ' decay, but only by an " external shock of extreme violence in association with a credible alternative. " Altvater notes the current crises of global capitalism: growth of the " army of the poor", despite an " immensely increasing wealth of the rich in the world"; increasing scarcity of fossil fuels; Destruction of nature and " reduction of social standards." The question of alternatives is therefore on the agenda. But a real change is not possible without changing the current power structures. These were based in capitalism on private property, which legitimizes the " forms of appropriation and expropriation, in the economic and social cultural, environmental sense." Altvater calls, however, a " solar and caring society ", to which there are already approaches in many places. This would " the end of capitalism as we know it" mean. In its sequel, however, was a risk of " empire of barbarism ", the beginnings of which are already visible.
Media
Altvater regularly published in the weekly newspaper of the Friday and the magazine marx21.