Political economy

Inspired by the conference on Capitalism in the Seventies that was co-organized by Theo van de Klundert and took place in Tilburg in September 1970, the economist Wim Boerboom launched a series of lectures on Marxist political economy in the 1973-1974 academic year. All this took place in the aftermath of the occupations of the College, which had also demanded educational innovation. Boerboom’s lectures were immediately in great demand, drawing crowds of 175 interested individuals on average, peaking to 400 when there were well-known authors, such as the Belgian professor and Trotskyist Ernest Mandel. This series of lectures then led to the working group for Political Economy (POLEK), which, until 1978, dedicated itself to having Marxist political economy reintroduced into the official curriculum where it had been before (1969-1971).

Redbook

To sustain its struggle, the working group published the Roodboek Politieke Ekonomie (Political Economy Redbook), explaining the differences between mainstream and Marxist economics. Subtitled Zur Kritik des Fünften Stockes, this treatise failed to gain the approval of the General Economics department, housed on the fifth floor of the current Koopmans Building. This department was reigned over by the renowned Professor Dirk Schouten, who, in the heat of the battle, ventured to compare the efforts of Boerboom, POLEK and the Kappataal faculty journal to Der Stürmer, the anti-Semitic Nazi journal, in daily newspaper De Telegraaf. This outraged POLEK, who took matters to court and forced Schouten to rectify. In 1976, then, the Economics faculty council decided to institute the subject of Political Economics of the Social Order (PEMO), which gave rise to another fracas, now about its intended professorship. Emotions sometimes ran high. On the eve of the tenth lustrum celebrations in 1977, for instance, POLEK campaigners stole 39 gowns, causing a regional journal to run the headline Tilburg Professors Left Disrobed. The day after the dies celebrations, the gowns resurfaced in the Chapel of Our Lady, Cause of Our Joy, on the Delmerweg close by.

Professor Glombowksi

Owing to squabbles of this kind, including a brief occupation, it would take three years before the German economist Jörg Glombowksi was finally appointed as PEMO professor, which he remained for fourteen years until he took up a professorship at the University of Osnabrück in 1993. His departure meant the end of the discipline. The POLEK working group also faded away in the nineties. This also signified the end of a range of its ancillary activities; POLEK had been involved, for example, in the training and education of (Industriebond NVV and Abvakabo) trade union executives and was closely involved in study trips to countries such as Albania, China and Cuba. One of these trips led to the Tilburg-Nicaragua town-twinning scheme, causing Tilburg still to be twinned with the town of Matagalpa.