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Alana Ackerman
Socialist Discourse vs. Capitalist Practice in Ecuador: The Tension Seen Through an Immigration Lens
The paper I propose to present is the result of fieldwork I carried out in Ecuador between 2010 and 2012 for my Master’s thesis, and focuses on the current tension in Ecuador between the government’s discourse based on twenty-‐first century socialism and contradictory capitalist practices masked by this discourse. I intend to locate this tension specifically in the field of Ecuadorian immigration.
Ecuador is well-‐known as a country of emigration, especially after the 1999 dollarization of the economy and ensuing financial crisis, but it is also a significant receiving country, mostly of migrants from Colombia, Peru, and the U.S. The current Ecuadorian immigration policy, which establishes visa categories and procedures, dates back to 1971, a time of military rule in the country’s history. This policy eases immigration for “desirable” foreigners who contribute to the strengthening of the capitalist economy—“investors,” “businessmen,” and “real estate holders”—as well as “spouses” of Ecuadorian men, a category that evidences patriarchal values (the woman as a political subject as she relates to her husband)—while making “undesired” immigration more difficult for those who do not contribute to the strengthening of the capitalist system, such as political refugees (mostly Colombians) and economic migrants (mostly Peruvians).
Partly in reaction to the financial crisis of 1999 and the corrupt neoliberal rule that followed, the population voted in 2006 for Alianza País, a party that advocates “twenty-‐first century socialism.” In 2008, a new Constitution was ratified in which an article declares the end of the concept of the “foreigner” and introduces the concept of “universal citizenship.” Despite this utopian socialist discourse in the state’s magna carta, an immigration policy based on exploitative and patriarchal ideals remains in force today, influencing different foreigners’ experiences of the immigration process in vastly different ways. Thus, I argue in my paper that socialist discourse in Ecuador appeases the electorate while allowing old asymmetrical models to continue operating with little debate or denouncement."
Nilufer Akalin
Dispossessed immigrants: The reproduction of racialization in the times of austerity measures
In the last decade, major social, economic and political developments in the South European countries have brought migration on to the centre stage in political discourse with a rise of racist and xenophobic discourses against migrants. The social, political stand and attitudes toward the excluded body (immigrant) had started to be articulated through the demolishment of the subject in the era of the symbolic demolishment of the human body under serious conditions of living in financial crisis. This paper seeks to make a contribution
to this line of research on how the social conflicts of the industrial world are translated in racial terms just as the financial crisis and the existence of Neo-‐Nazi party in Greece was becoming the manner to divide, rank human beings by reference to selected embodies properties to subordinate, exclude, and exploit them. Regarding the current political and economic situation, some material trajectory can be traced through racialization and racism that are being implied in Greek society. This research paper focuses, as a case study, on the understanding of how inequality is structured and reproduced under global capitalism, addressing the patterns of behavior, organizational outcomes, state policies, practices and articulations of ethnoracial inequality and control. This paper also aims to demonstrate to what extent the austerity measures produce a new form of racialization. Therefore, it situates the relationship of immigrants, the state and Golden Dawn at the central axes to understand why and how the austerity measures produce racialization.
Barbara Allen
Alexander Shlyapnikov under Arrest, 1935-‐7
Alexander Shlyapnikov, an Old Bolshevik and leader of the Workers' Opposition in the Russian Communist Party from 1919 to 1921, was arrested by the NKVD in January 1935, as were many other former oppositionists in the wake of the Kirov murder. Interrogated in 1935-‐6, he was tried and executed in 1937. Charges escalated from counterrevolutionary activity and anti-‐Soviet agitation to terrorism and conspiracy to assassinate Stalin. Shlyapnikov contested the charges and refused to implicate others. The interrogation protocols and his written statements attached to the protocols reflect his struggle to reveal the absurdity of the charges against him and to preserve his own sense of identity as a revolutionary. At his closed trial by the military collegium of the USSR Supreme Court in September 1937, he denied all the charges against him and confessed that he was only guilty of having had ‘a liberal attitude toward those persons around him.’ His behavior differed significantly from that of other Old Bolsheviks such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, who confessed in public trial, supposedly for the benefit of the party. He asserted that his confession to outlandish charges would not serve the party’s interests.
Riya Mary Al'Sanah
The struggle for democracy in the Tunisian revolution
Tunisia has been held up by the international community as the prime example of a country succeeding in a “democratic transition process” in contrast to Egypt, Syria or Libya: it is politically stable, it has adopted a new constitution praised by the international community, it has carried out transparent elections, and it has signed a loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund.
However, the reality in Tunisia is much more complicated. The Tunisian bourgeoisie and remnants of the Ben Ali regime are reasserting themselves through increased repression against political decent and growing calls against industrial action and for a “social truce”.
This paper will look at democratic forms, as promoted from above by the Tunisian elite and international organisations and contrast them with revolutionary democratic structures developed from below. We will discuss the substance and nature of the democratic transition taking place in Tunisia today. Furthermore, we will address whether the democratic structures developed by the revolutionary movement can offer an alternative to the promoted model of neoliberal democracy."
Valentina Alvarez
Experience of domestic work in Chile: social reproduction an identity construction of the working classes
During the 1970’ decade, the Domestic Labour Debate reflected about the relevance of domestic labour to capitalism in order to unveil the particular place of women into class struggle. Despite differences among DLD theorist, they all agreed that, through producing a docile workforce or maintaining a reserve army of labour -‐to put some examples-‐, capitalism was the main beneficiary of women’s domestic labour. Therefore, they thought, revolutionary practices can only be deployed when domestic labour is rejected, socialized or done while its bearers –women-‐ engage in proletarian struggles.
Some years before that debate, domestic work and childcare experiences of Chilean women from popular sectors in 1970 questioned such statements. They showed how reproductive labour did not only benefit capitalism. Working class women were producing in daily basis a sense of dignity for their families that invested them with authority for their struggle. However, they did so by reproducing traditional gender roles. In that vein, I argue that is necessary to enquiry domestic work beyond the economic reductionism of DLD to understand its multiple dimensions. To account for particular experiences and the meanings attached to them can shed light in that direction.
Leandro BeatrizAlves
Moments of danger, moments of opportunity: Trade unions and climate change
That trade unions (TUs) are “fading away” is widely accepted. Explanations for this draw on broader societal processes, e.g. the reduction of manufacturing in industrialised countries, where TUs were strongest, the increase of the service and IT sector, where they have less experience in organising, and the casualisation of employments. Paradoxically, individualisation processes occur in a situation where the needs of a collective and global response to global crises (financial, food, ecological) are acute.
In the case of TUs this is especially true against the background of globalisation, which strengthens the power of Transnational Corporations to relocate production and dictate the working conditions in the Global South as well as in the Global North and to set workers in competition to each other (Chan/Ross 2003, Cowie, 2001). TUs are the only kinds of organisations that are present in virtually every country around the globe (The ITUC represents 175 million workers in 155 countries and territories and has 311 national affiliates.). Thus, potentially they are the only force to challenge the power of TNCs.
In reality, though, they are struggling with structural transformations including the diversification of the workforce in terms of feminisation and ethnic diversity (Schierup et. al. 2006, Ward 1990, Mulinari/Neergaard 2003). Furthermore, new international bodies and the political recognition of climate change have exerted pressures on unions to re-‐formulate their policies (Hyman/Ferner 1994). The overdetermination of these processes constitutes a transitional phase where social actors have to reconsider the parameters of their actions. Unions have to simultaneously reassure their traditional membership, recruit new members, cooperate with other social movements as well as global organisations (e.g., World Bank, IMF), act on a global level but remain rooted at the local, and accommodate new issues like climate change and North-‐South divide.
In other words, unions are living what Walter Benjamin has called “moments of danger”. In contrast to the notion of “crisis” Benjamin’s term denotes not only the threat of disintegration but also the threat of “conformism that is about to overpower” tradition (Benjamin 1974).
Selected Unions: 1. The metal workers’ unions are arguably the best organised and largest world-‐wide and are also those facing the greatest challenges from climate change policies, relocation of production from the North to the South, and redundancies due to technological innovation. Their international (IMF), regional (EMF), and national branches in the selected countries will constituted one of the two major case studies of our study. The metal sector in most countries of the European Union has a comparatively high percentage of migrant workers, which will make it possible to investigate whether these workers are having an important role in shaping new union policies.
2. About one third of the world’s workers are employed in the agricultural sector. Agriculture is integrated into the issues of climate change and the North-‐South divide: On the one hand it is the sector most hardly hit by the effect of climate change, while at the same time, it produces significant effects on climate change. It also plays a significant role in the North-‐South relationships, since predominantly Northern companies are responsible for the advancement of agribusiness threatening farming on small scale in countries of the South. The IUF and other unions of food workers are forming alliances with non-‐union associations like “Via Campesina” to address these conflicts. As opposed to the metal sector where the majority of workers are men, about 70% of the agricultural workers are women.
Thus a combined study of these two sectors will allow us to better compare the influence of gender relations on new union policies.
The selected countries: The core of our investigation is in Europe looking at the national and local unions in the metal and agricultural sector: Sweden, UK and Spain. Unions in all these countries have made huge efforts to integrate climate change issues into their policies and to engage with environmental organisations, whereby Spanish unions seem most advanced. In order to gain a broader insight into different regimes of countries of the South we have chosen Brazil, South Africa and India. All three countries are integrated into the global economy, while having different trade union histories.
We have conducted an average of 20 in-‐depth life-‐histories interviews (per country) with union officials responsible for the departments of Environment and/or International Relations and members of rural organisations (such as MST – Landless Workers’ Movement and MMC – Rural Women Movement from Brazil) and rural unions.
We aim to present our findings at the Eleventh Annual Conference.
Maurice Andreu
Did the leadership of the Communist International believe that capitalism could not survive?
The leadership of the Communist International thought certainly that its revolutionary action should put capitalism to its end. This historical confidence had an economic and political basis: the world war crisis of 1914 revealed all the limits of capitalism and created the conditions of its reversal. The CI, almost always, explained its failure by the mistakes and the weakness of the revolutionaries, not by capitalist ability to rise again from its ashes. My paper will confirm that the leadership of the Comintern believed that capitalism would be soon dead… But there is sometimes a kind of ambiguity. I shall speak of two cases: Lenin, in 1921, when the CI takes the turn of « United Front » and Bukharin, in 1928, when the words « general crisis of capitalism » are introduced in the Program of the Comintern.
Thanos Andritsos
In search of unity: From the multiple geographies of resistance to the “common place” of a renewed class project.
Greece, from 2009 onwards, became the epicenter of the global financial crisis. In this period very intense social struggles took place. Many studies for the so called “greek resistance” seem to focus on highlighting unilaterally only certain aspects (such as the mobilization in the squares of aganaktismenoi, experiments of self-‐organization and social solidarity, local and environmental struggles, workers' strikes, the electoral rise of the left, etc.) and lack in an overall picture and perspective.
The current paper understands all the major battles as moments in the evolution of the power relations and the class struggle inside the Greek society. Our main goals are a) to map the current social movements’ geographies and b) to highlight the issue of unification of all the struggles under a common anti-‐systemic context.
In this order, we can trace three processes of unifying:
1. “Unifying” as a demand of the movements: An ""internal"" process coming from the development, the discourse and the political practices of the movements.
2. “Unifying” as a consequence of dominant politics: An ""external"" process coming primarily from the government’s practice to target every single popular mobilization as unified threat.
3. “Unifying” as a common radical theoretical resultant. A current attempt in the radical theory‘s discourse to search for a unified political subject.
Taking into account these processes, the paper seeks for the preconditions for a shift from the multiple geographies of resistance to a “common place” of the renewed class project."
Ricardo Antunes
The International Working Class 150 Years After and its Challenges Today
The International Workingmen's Association (IWA) was born in London on September 28, 1864 with the essential principle: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.” What does it mean to think of an international organization of the working class today? Given the globalized shape of capitalism, has it not become even more urgent to create a new project of international working-‐class organization? In order to explore these crucial questions, we must initially try to understand the new morphology of labor and some of its principal tendencies. Stable work is being replaced by atypical labour. How is it possible to organize this new proletariat? How can this growing sector of the working class advance toward class consciousness, under conditions of the transnationalization of capital? How can it link up with the more traditional sectors of the working class?
Just as capital is a global system, the world of labor and its challenges are also increasingly transnationalized. Given that the destructive logic of capital is seemingly multiple but in essence unitary, if these vital poles of labor don’t ally themselves organically, they will suffer the tragedy of greater precarization. If, on the other hand, they forge ties of solidarity, defining and planning their actions, they may have greater power than any other social force to demolish the capital system and thereby begin delineating a new way of life."
Stephen Ashe
‘Whatever happened to the labour movement?’ A Gramscian analysis of the electoral rise and ‘fall’ of the British National Party
In ‘Whatever happened to the Labour Movement?’ Thomas Linehan provided a historical analysis of support for the British Union of Fascists, the National Front and the British National Party, as well as the role that the labour movement has played in preventing such parties from making greater political inroads in working class areas during the 1930s and the 1970s. For Linehan, the emergence of the British National Party in 2002 can be put down to a unique combination of structural, political and ideological factors. In particular, Linehan emphasises the weakening of the traditional tripartite alliance between the working class, the Labour party and the trade union movement. This paper will test Linehan’s thesis by exploring the electoral rise and ‘fall’ of the BNP in Barking and Dagenham between 2004 and 2010. This paper will argue that a richer, deeper analysis of the BNP’s electoral breakthrough and subsequent demise can be gained by drawing upon Antonio Gramsci’s carceral writings on hegemony (Gramsci, 1971), and in particular by developing a wider analyses of the relationship between the local state and civil society.
Abigail Bakan
Marxism, Intersectionality and Indigenous Feminism
Global capitalism has proven to be tenaciously resilient, manifest not only in its continuing exploitation, but also in processes of gender and racial oppression. While the linkages among gendered and racialized oppression, and class exploitation, have been the focus of some Marxist feminist theorists (Himani Bannerji, Angela Davis, Collette Guillaumin), it is American legal feminist theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw who has helpfully coined the term “intersectionality”, applied primarily to the US context. This increasingly influential concept has significantly broadened the potential ground on which to link anti-‐racist feminism with Marxist theory. Scant attention, however, has specifically addressed the contributions of indigenous feminism, though formative in anti-‐racist theory and practice in North America. This lacuna is evidenced in both intersectional feminist and Marxist feminist scholarship. However, Marx’s interest in indigenous societies – not least gender relations in indigenous societies – was significant (Ethnological Notebooks, 1880-‐82), and considerably influenced Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. This paper (i) theorizes the significance of attention to indigenous feminist contributions regarding intersectional feminist and Marxist feminist conversations; and (ii) attends to the specific tenacity of the North American states as case studies, exemplifying such theorization. I suggest that Marxist understandings of the gendered and racialized experiences of imperialism, social reproduction, and anti-‐colonial resistance, can be considerably advanced through an engagement with the contributions of indigenous feminism.
Laurent Baronian
Marx and living labour
I propose to present issues of my book "Marx and living labour" (Routledge, 2013) related to the question: How capitalism survives? The basic idea linking all the chapters together is that Marx, from his early economic works, conceived the labour of any kind of society as a set of production activities and analysed the historical modes of production as specific ways of distributing and exchanging these activities. On the contrary, political economy considers the labour only under the form of its product, and the exchange of products as commodities as the unique form of social labour exchange. For Marx, insofar as the labour creating value represents a specific mode of exchanging the society's living labour, general and abstract labour cannot not only be defined as the substance or measure unit of the commodity, as in Smith or Ricardo, but foremost as an expense of living labour, i.e. of nerves, muscles, brain, etc. Hence the twofold nature of living labour, as a concrete activity producing a use value and an expense of human labour in general producing exchange value. Marx himself claimed that this twofold nature of labour creating value was its main and most important contribution to economic science. This book aims at showing how both determines the original categories and economic laws in Capital and constitutes the profound innerspring of Marx's critique of political economy. The role and function of living labour is highlighted by showing how, on the one hand, the opposition between living and dead labour is at the origin of the deepest contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, whereas on the other hand capitalism survives, i.e. overcomes its contradictions and pushes its own limits, only be appropriating more extensively and intensively the social productive forces created by the living labour of individual producers developing cooperation links. The contradictions based on opposition between living and dead labour suggest a Marxian interpretation of the current crisis which must be distinguished from underconsumption and stagnation theories of crises.
Emmanuel Barot
One-‐dimensional Man, fifty years after
This year marks the 50th birthday of "One-‐Dimensional Man" : what remains of our Marcusian lovings ? Marked by so-‐called “pessimism”, exalting the "Great Refusal" of outsiders, and lamenting the integration of the proletariat to capital, Marcuse ushered in the era of post-‐proletarian multitudes and supposedly at this time gave up Marxism, turned to revisionism and fell into an anarcho-‐leftist romantic utopism. Is this statement really valid ? Actually he kept the idea that capitalism was not able to digest any form of struggle, an heterodox but close relationship to Marxism, and maintained the strategic question of how organize the class struggle facing an ultra-‐violent late capitalism. What lessons are to be learned from these dialectical ambivalences ?
Pritish Behuria
Balancing Violence and Ideas: Historical Strategies of Elite Capital Accumulation in Rwanda
Strategies of Primitive Accumulation in Rwanda have traditionally been organized around primary commodities -‐ particularly coffee. Rwanda's own 'natural economy' was complicated by its colonial history and the introduction of cash crop production in this respect. Immediately, the ethnic/class heirarchy prevalent in the country became an arena of competition around the capacity to push farmers to grow increasing coffee. Chiefs, at this time, were rewarded on the basis of their capacity to organize labour in this respect through coercion and creating collective identities. As the country became independent, the heirarchy was further altered, as traditional 'class' divisions became 'ethnic' divisions in order to collectivize violence and incite revolution. The first two governments continued the same strategy of accumulation and managed their elites through the distribution of rents in these sectors. Crucially, coffee became part of the national effort and became bound on ideas of 'economic nationalism'. This was also woven in the fabric of ethnic opposition against traditional Tutsi leadership.
The Post-‐Genocide Government has attempted to break away from traditional class dynamics around primary commodity specialization. It has served to both disperse elites and labour to different sectors, thus reducing the capacity for resistance from below and within the elite bargain in the country. The destructive forces of capitalism have accompanied economic development in the country and the central governing apparatus legitimizes itself on the basis of violence, rather than the force of a 'national effort' in the same way as its predecessors.
This paper will study strategies of elite capital accumulation that have taken place historically in Rwanda, contrasting the balancing of violence and ideas in managing resistance from its elites, as well as 'from below'."
Riccardo Bellofiore
Which crisis, which capitalism? Marxian political economy and Financial Keynesianism.
This paper presents an analysis of the crisis combining a Marxian and a Financial Keynesian perspective. Both are framed in a long-‐run perspective of the capitalist dynamics. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall has to be interpreted as affirmed to the countertendencies winning over the tendency, and through the change in the forms of capitalisms. Neither the classical versions of the fall of the rate of profit or an underconsumptionist view are tenable; the same can be said against the traditional post-‐Keynesian analyses of the crisis.
Each crisis erupts because of the contradictions in the idiosyncratic factors explaining the ascent. We are experiencing the crisis not of a generic Neoliberalism or a void financialisation, but of a money manager capitalism, which was built upon a concentration without centralisation of capital, new forms of corporate governance, aggressive
competition, a capital market inflation, indebted consumption. A world able to gain in new forms the same good (or rather, bad) old exploitation, to provide internally demand, and to present itself as a stable Great Moderation.
The paper will show how this constituted a financially privatised Keynesianism, based on a new monetary policy and a new autonomous demand driving the process, a configuration which was necessarily unsustainable. The paper will show how the crisis evolved from a Great Recession to a Lesser Depression, looking at the specificities of the European crisis, which (like the global crisis) is not due to trade imbalances, nor to government public deficits, even not the euro in itself."
Bernhard H. Bayerlein
The Abortive Women's International (1919-‐1943)
Within the global deployment of the so-‐called mass or solidarity organizations for different social categories and specific objectives as segments of the wider framework of the communist movement, women occupied a special place. The paper shoes that from an institutional, personal and cultural perspective the women’s organizations prefigured a “Women’s International” together with unions, cooperatives, intellectuals, anti-‐colonialist, anti-‐fascist initiatives ... The paper verifies how feminism and gender solidarity in the "Comintern solar system" were thwarted and short-‐circuited by Stalinism and transformed into an appendage of Soviet structures and "cultural diplomacy".
Anindya Bhattacharyya
Abstract oppression and social reproduction
The Marxist concept of oppression is used to describe a wide variety of social phenomena involving systematic discrimination against a minority. Racism and sexism are the basic examples but the category has ramified over the decades, taking in Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ablism to name but a few. In recent years there has been renewed interest on the left in how these oppressions interact – the intersectionality debate – and how they relate to exploitation of workers and the antagonism between ruling and working class.
Clearly these oppressions have something in common: otherwise we would not group these phenomena under a single term, or deploy similar arguments across the gamut of oppressions (eg the argument that they weaken the working class by pitting worker against worker). Yet for all this there does not seem to be any Marxist theory of oppression in general -‐ what I call abstract oppression. What is X-‐ism, where X is an unspecified political minority? Are all oppressions ""the same"" or are there significant differences between, say, racism and sexism?
This paper seeks to outline an approach to oppression in the abstract. The aim is to set the various Marxist theories of concrete oppressions on a rigorous conceptual foundation – a necessary step if notions of intersectionality etc are ever to move beyond empirical description. It ends by indicating how, if abstract oppression is the ""superstructure"", then social reproduction is the ""base"". By understanding oppression abstractly we gain a better grasp of how the are undergirded and perpetuated by political economy: the replenishment of labour power through childrearing and immigration is intimately linked to sexism and racism respectively. This approach can lay the foundation ""grand unified theory"" of exploitation and oppression that can act as a framework for understanding all these phenomena as a totality."
Ian Birchall
Rereading Rosmer in 2014
1914 was a major victory for the capitalist order. A growing European socialist movement was, in Trotsky’s words, so reduced that at Zimmerwald it was possible to seat all the internationalists in four coaches. As Michael Gove’s recent elucubrations show, it is still a site of ideological contest. Lazy clichés, like “nation overrides class” or “Second International Marxism” are inadequate to offer an explanation. Alfred Rosmer’s uncompleted Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la guerre (2 vols, 1936, 1959) makes a valuable contribution to our understanding. Rosmer combines the memoirs of an anti-‐war activist with archival research, and draws on Georges Dumoulin’s fascinating pamphlet Les Syndicalists français pendant la guerre (1918). Trotsky rightly urged that “every serious proletarian revolutionary ought to read -‐ more exactly, to study -‐ Rosmer’s book”. Rosmer came from the syndicalist tradition, but recognised that syndicalism was part of the problem; he was an independent thinker who did not endorse Lenin’s strategy of revolutionary defeatism. Rosmer’s stated aim was “to recall what happened yesterday, to relate the facts, to show their interconnection, and to draw out their meaning; the lesson must then be so clear that it will provide the reply to the agonising questions of the present.”
David Black
Sohn-‐Rethel's Neo-‐Kantian Marxism -‐ A Critique
"Alfred Sohn-‐Rethel located the origin of philosophical abstraction in the ""false consciousness"" brought about by the new money economy of Greek Antiquity. In the Enlightenment the conceptual barrier Kant put between phenomenal reality and the ""thing-‐in-‐itself"" expressed, in Sohn-‐Rethel's view, the reified consciousness stemming from commodity-‐exchange and the division of mental and manual labor. Because Sohn-‐Rethel saw the entire history of philosophy as branded by a timeless universal logic, he dismissed Hegel's concept of ""totality"" as ""idealist"" and Hegel's critique of Kantian dualism as irrelevant to Marx's critique of political economy.
David Black suggests that Marx's exposition of the fetishism of commodities is historically-‐specific to capitalist production, and therefore cannot explain the origins of philosophy, which Black shows to have involved various historical developments in Greek society and culture as well as monetization. Just as Hegel's critique of Kantian formalism informs Marx's critique of capital, Hegel's writings on how the proper organization of labor might abolish the barrier Aristotle put between production and the ""Realm of Freedom"" prefigure Marx's efforts to formulate of an alternative to capitalism.
Paul Blackledge
Engels and the Problem of Working-‐Class Reformism
Thrown into sharp relief by the events of August 1914, working-‐class reformism has been amongst the most important strategic issues facing the revolutionary left over the last century. Thirty years ago Carol Johnson famously argued that part of the problem faced by the twentieth-‐century left was that Marx had nowhere developed a coherent theory of working-‐class reformism. In this paper I explore Engels’s tentative attempts to fill this gap in the decade or so after Marx’s death. Taken up by Lenin and Luxemburg alongside Kautsky and Bernstein, Engels’s arguments have been a source of recurring debate ever since the publication of his supposed “Testament” in 1895. In this paper I argue that this literature is marked by a tendency to proceed from a fairly one-‐dimensional view of the revolutionary politics Marx and Engels elaborated around 1848. By reading Engels later political writings against the backdrop of an attempt to unpick this caricatured interpretation of his earlier revolutionary perspective I hope to shine a new light on the debates of the 1890s with a view to informing contemporary strategic debate.
Eric Blanc
National Liberation and Bolshevism Reexamined
This paper analyzes the socialist debates on the national question up through 1914 in the Czarist empire. I argue that an effective strategy of anti-‐colonial Marxism was first put forward by the non-‐Russian socialists, not the Bolsheviks. Lenin and his comrades lagged behind the borderland Marxists on this crucial issue well into the Civil War—and this political weakness helps explain the Bolshevik failure to build roots among dominated peoples. Consequently, the Bolsheviks were either too numerically weak and/or indifferent to national aspirations to successfully lead socialist revolutions in the borderlands, facilitating the isolation of the Russian workers’ government and the subsequent rise of Stalinism."
Claire Blencowe
Feminist Investments in Biopolitical Life: Racism, Progress & Methods of Critique
This paper begins with the story of eugenicist feminism, pointing to the entangled genealogies of biopolitical governance, racism and twentieth century European and North American feminist politics. It goes on to question the 'assertion of contingency' as a tactic in undermining biopolitical knowledges and investments -‐ suggesting that such assertions have acted to mask, rather than to dislodge, biopolitical racism within feminist politics as elsewhere. Contingency, development and progress are technologies of attachment that invest feminist agency in biopolitical life (and so economies of endless growth and expansion). These investments persist in contemporary landscapes in which race, population and growth are understood as aspects of culture, religion and education more than biology. The paper highlights the dangers of denying and denouncing, rather than attending to, our own investments in despicable politics. It calls for 'generous methods' (M'charek) in the study of feminist racism.
Mark Blum
Max Adler's social theory: a foundation for more effective interpersonal cooperation
The Austro-‐Marxist Max Adler’s theoretical career included the development of a concept of societal socialization which was not fully appreciated by his peers, nor consequently by posterity. Only his student, and later prominent Marxist Lucien Goldmann , comprehended the full implications of his concept of what might be called ‘micro-‐sociological’ socialization [Vergesellschaftung]. Adler’s conceptual turn stresses that every society has its own manner of organizing an interdependence insofar as each develops structures that must fulfill the cognitive imperative of a practical vision of the totality of its participants. Past forms failed in their governing hegemonies to realize the equality and interpersonal depth of cooperation that socialism could effect. Max Adler’s understanding of interpersonal relations, while preceding even the group dynamics movement that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s (Moreno, Lewin), insisted on not only a more refined knowledge of the dynamics of human cooperation, but a clear understanding of the institutional problems that could obstruct knowledgeable interaction. Lucien Goldmann wrestled with this problem of interpersonal understanding in the 1950s. As Max Adler and to a degree Otto Bauer, Goldmann knew that only by a more public recognition of how the norms of collective cooperation were distorted within societal institutions in a capitalist culture could effective socialization be realized. Training in cooperative empathy finally had to meet the wall of normative praxis in the everyday world. Max Adler understood that every human culture over time has its own manner of structuring cooperative association [vergesellschaften] . Each manner of organization generates values that justifies its praxis. But, a socialized society required a discerning interdependent depth of knowing into how human cooperation occurs or founders. The “functional democracy” which the Austro-‐Marxists strove for, that is the interdependent equality of all participants in any societal effort, required a new address of how cooperation could actually be realized. The works councils were a functioal address of this democratic socialization, but even they often foundered
because of the lack of insight into an effective association of differing persons, skills, and temperaments. Socialization today still suffers under the lack of micro-‐sociological discernment of association as it is practiced in societal institutions, and, without further development of the group dynamic understanding of its praxis in everyday efforts of cooperative activity, a socialization from the top down—by mandate—only reproduces how cooperation has occurred within the historical norms of capitalist and pre-‐capitalist societies.
Félix Boggio & Stella Magliani-‐Belkacem
The 'democratic question' today and the struggle for hegemony.
Although it has been entangled for a long time with a stalinist political practice, the 'democratic question' has had a rich marxist legacy. From Marx to Lenin through Kautsky and Gramsci, the main thinkers of classical social democracy and communism have consistently pointed out the unifying potential of democratic demands for revolutionary politics. Theoretically, a strand of marxist thinking that started with Gramsci and was taken upon by Poulantzas and post-‐althusserian authors has developed a new problematization of ""democracy"". Neither mere liberalization of State institutions nor simply self-‐organization at the grassroots, ""democracy"" is a dialectical process of unification and leadership-‐building of the oppressed and exploited against their ""passivization"" by State apparatuses and authoritarian statism.
Against this rich background of theory and practice, contemporary socialist organizing seems to lag behind it: 'democracy' is either reduced to procedural-‐formal processes inside social movements and socialist parties or it is considered of limited relevance for today's struggles in the West. While it seems completely straightforward to imagine the unifying potential of 'down with Mubarak' in Cairo, 'democratic demands' in the West are thought only in the terms of 'solidarity' against repression in particular struggles or through the lens of antifascism.
Our paper aims first at acknowledging this gap between marxist theorizing and socialist organizing. This gap is indeed an index of several methodological pitfalls: a division between East and West, a 'stageist' understanding of bourgeois institutions, an instrumental conception of democratic demands (as simply providing stepping stones for the worker's movement). Secondly, we want to raise the question of the racial divide at work in this gap. It is indeed clearly the case that non-‐white people have struggled more than often in the last 40 years against State repression, mass incarceration and in favor of more inclusive institutions (both at the narrowly political level and at the economic level). Is not the left's weakness in relation to democratic demands also a symptom (and a reason) for its incapacity to relate to non-‐white struggles?
Lastly, we want to emphasize how democratic demands may provide today a fertile ground for a left strategy: first as a way to bridge the gap with non-‐white communities in resistance, secondly because social and economic struggles cannot succeed without attacking the authoritarian character of neoliberal institutions, thirdly because democracy lays the foundations of a non-‐nationalist narrative for a people's unity in the struggle for hegemony.
Patrick Bond, Ama Biney and Castro Ngobese
South Africa’s Elite Transition: looking backward and forward South Africa's twenty-‐year elite transition -‐ from racial apartheid to neoliberalism, in the process amplifying unemployment, inequality and ecological destruction -‐ follows patterns witnessed in many other neo-‐colonial African regime changes dating to the late 1950s. However, there are several political initiatives from the left which hold promise, including the breakaway by the largest trade union from its alliance with the ruling party. This discussion about past, present and future features one of the transition's leading political economists (Patrick Bond), the former editor of the Pambazuka African ezine (Ama Biney) and the spokesperson of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Castro Ngobese).
Mathieu Bonzom
How immigration control survives in the US: the current immigration regime, hegemony and strategy
This paper is an analysis of immigration control in the US today, in terms of hegemony. Laws, enforcement policies, and debates surrounding them, have been shaped by successive administrations and legislatures so as to combine various sets of political demands, mainly those of big business owners, opponents of mass immigration, and immigrants themselves. In a logic akin to that of the historic bloc, this generates power by assembling demands that are not immediately and fully compatible. The stability of such an immigration regime can only be maintained by a political process implementing numerous ad hoc reforms. Hence, only some of the many government interventions, such as the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), rework all dimensions of this overarching regime: anti-‐immigration measures and a mass legalization plan. The limited character of each set of policies (or their enforcement) allows for the reproduction of a subaltern population of immigrants. The IRCA illustrates the general goals of the immigration regime: satisfying employers' demands in the best possible way, by harnessing and reproducing both anti-‐immigrant sentiment and immigrant consent to contingent statuses (this reproduction is ensured by simultaneously rewarding those impulses and preventing their full satisfaction).
While focusing on immigration in the neoliberal era, it will be possible to show elements of synchronic and diachronic continuity, with race relations more generally, and with the treatment of immigrant and racial minorities in a less recent past.
The hegemonic dynamic makes it difficult for immigrant movements to come up with a strategy that does not end up allowing, or indeed contributing to, the perpetuation and relaunching of the regime. At the same time, the reproduction of immigrant consent can cut both ways: when it is fragilized by political circumstances prioritizing coercion, mobilization opportunities appear, as was the case in 2006, and arguably has been ever since.
Instead of wallowing in the sophistication of hegemonic apparatuses, identifying the blocking points they create should feed contributions to counter-‐hegemonic strategy. One of several racial issues to be tackled that way is the immigration regime. The sense of defeat following the short-‐term victory of the 2006 mass movement, has been enhanced by Democratic party policies intensifying or allowing more coercion, and channeling the movement's demands into ""Comprehensive Immigration Reform"" bills that could be termed ""IRCA 2.0"". Mobilizations around immediate demands like stopping all deportations (""Not 1 More"" campaign) and tactical innovations involving ""coming out"" and daring acts of civil disobedience (aiming at demonstrating that the risks of being undocumented are lower than they seem especially when people get organized), appear as important contributions. Frequently embraced by immigrant leaders with an ultimate ""legalization for all"" agenda, those perspectives do not directly demand a legalization plan but avert the divisive logic of IRCA-‐like bills (selective legalization, repression, relaunching the regime). They may thus be better suited to both rebuilding the dynamic and reinventing the strategic goals of immigrant mobilization, in a counter-‐hegemonic fashion.
Tobias Boos
From ¡Que se vayan todos! to a binarising state perspective
The Latin-‐American discussion about populism has a long and rich tradition. Since the election of the so called progressive governments in the region there have been numerous contributions to the debate, especially with regard to Ernesto Laclau´s concept of populism. One of the first and most interesting critiques of his approach was already formulated by Portantiero and de Ìpola in 1981. In this article they observe a kind of organicist hegemony that characterizes existing populist governments which reduces the heterogeneity of popular demands.
The paper utilizes Antonio Gramsci´s concepts of common sense and moral and intellectual leadership and stresses their fundamental role in regard to the process of gaining hegemony. By exploring the representations of kirchnerist militants and sympathisers about the current balance of forces and the political situation it shows that their interpretations contain a very specific idea of the state structuring their vision of politics.
Derek Boothman
The communist movement in Turin: an extended essay by Gramsci
There has recently come to light the handwritten original version of the longest single piece written by Gramsci before the highly influential essay on the Southern question on which he was working at the time of his arrest in 1926. This earlier essay, on the factory council and communist movement, including the role of the weekly journal L’Ordine Nuovo, was his direct and immediate assessment of the events leading up to the red two years (“biennio rosso”) in Turin, a city defined in the essay as “the Petrograd of the Italian proletarian Revolution”. It deals in particular with the mass general strike of April 1920, news of which, according to the manuscript’s opening lines, was received enthusiastically in Russia. At its height the month-‐long strike involved half a million people out of a regional population of 4 million, the working-‐class mass being “led solely by the [Turinese] Section of the Socialist Party, comprised in its absolute entirety of communist workers”. According to an annotation in another hand on a later typed-‐up version, the essay consists of fifteen pages with, as was Gramsci’s wont, very few corrections, and dates to the summer or early autumn of 1920. It thus predates both the founding congress of the Italian Communist Party (January 1921) and Gramsci’s eighteen-‐month stint as an Italian representative in Moscow on the Executive and Presidium of the Comintern. Printed versions of the essay, published at the time, are hard to come by in any language, and in any case such writings were normally subject to editing for length, or in order to cut material judged extraneous to other national experiences (not to mention possible inaccuracies in translation), and so the manuscript version assumes added importance. As well as its purely historical interest, as a comment by a leading participant in the events themselves, what emerges is an early attempt by Gramsci to give a detailed break-‐down of class forces and of the organizations of the urban working class, to discuss the question of power in society – and the value even of defeats – and to define a politics of alliances. In the space allotted, we shall try to illustrate the main lines of the document and put them into the context of Gramsci’s subsequent development.
Toby Boraman
Polynesian involvement in the New Zealand strike wave from the late 1960s to the mid-‐1980s
Marxists in Anglophone countries have largely neglected the role indigenous peoples have played in class struggle, often based on the assumption that indigenous people are highly marginal to that struggle. Furthermore, despite wage labour being an integral part of Polynesian life in New Zealand, studies of Polynesians in New Zealand have largely ignored it. Commentators often assume that Polynesians are marginalised victims of capital (including colonialism and imperialism) and racism. Even labour historians have almost totally ignored the role Polynesians have played in the labour movement. Far from being helpless victims, many Polynesians participated in numerous struggles in the workplace during the upturn in workplace dissent in New Zealand from the late 1960s to the mid-‐1980s. Indeed, Māori workers were generally at the forefront of this struggle. Many Pasifika migrants and their descendants also became active and important participants in labour
struggle by the mid-‐ to late 1970s, although some barriers to involvement remained. In the workplace, many Polynesians brought aspects of their culture to their struggle to humanise, minimise and resist wage work. As such they often created, adopted and adapted various forms of informal and formal resistance in the workplace. To some extent, aspects of Polynesian culture shaped many strikes and other forms of dissent. While a major fusing of class and ethnicity occurred, by the early 1980s bitter conflict developed between some advocates of Maori sovereignty and some trade unions. This paper will examine Polynesian involvement in workplace unrest in three industries – the timber industry, the meat processing industry and the cleaning industry."
Kajsa Borgnäs
An ecological Marxist critique of the “green growth” and “no-‐growth“ concepts
The political idea of “green growth” motivates most of today’s so called sustainability policies in developed countries. As a counter-‐argument, ecological economists have coined the idea of “no-‐growth” or steady state economics as a sustainability goal. Whereas on the one hand the former serves as an attempt to reconcile the demands of capitalist economies and democratic states on behalf of any real ecological sustainability, no-‐growth theories often underestimate the forces and logics of both capital and state. Taking an ecological Marxist and Marxist crisis theory perspective as its starting point, this article scrutinizes green growth and no-‐growth logics and argues that strategies need to be more radical in order to achieve a truly sustainable economy.
Bruno Bosteels
Marx in Times of Riots: The Late Writings of José Revueltas
This paper addresses the late political writings of the Mexican activist-‐writer José Revueltas, between Essay on a Headless Proletariat and the posthumous texts collected in Mexico 1969: Youth and Revolution. Revueltas will appear as the supreme theorist of the contemporary moment, defined as the age of riots in search of new forms of politics and dominated by anarcho-‐communist ideas and practices. Where Revueltas was looking back, trying to resituate his own work in light of the cooptation of the Mexican Revolution from the beginning of the twentieth century, this work as become uncannily prescient of current events at the start of the new millennium. In studying these late writings, finally, I will be preparing their upcoming translation for the Historical Materialism book series from Brill.
Ulrich Brand
Growth and Domination. Shortcomings of the (De-‐)Growth Debate
The growth critical debate could be more fertile if economic growth were considered more carefully in its connection with the ruling capitalist and patriarchal modes of production and living. In this way, we can understand economic growth as a social relation which is
Here the ‘hegemonic apparatus’ of the Soviet state during the NEP period required continual adjustment to guard against encouraging separatist sentiments on the part of the mainly rural Ukrainian-‐speaking population, while avoiding resentments on the part of the mainly Russian-‐speaking urban proletariat. In addition to these problems, the modalities of the concessions made were affected by the emergence of a relatively wealthy peasant minority and petty urban capitalists as a direct result of the NEP itself, as well as the complications brought about by the presence of significant national minorities (Jewish, Greek, Romanian etc) within the Ukrainian SSR.
Debates over the formulation of Soviet policy in Ukraine occupied all the leading Bolsheviks from the intense debates about general nationality policy in 1923 until the regime’s move to crush peasant resistance to collectivisation at the end of the decade. There was an intense dialogue between Ukrainian Party leaders (Rakovskii, Lebed, Shumskii, Korniushin) and those at the Centre (Zinovʹ′ev, Bukharin, Stalin), which can be traced through arguments at the major Party congresses and in correspondence and other documentation that circulated between State and Party agencies. There is a considerable level of sophistication in these debates that reveal the ways in which the notion of hegemony was developed and applied throughout the decade. Consideration of such material shows that Gramsci’s writing about the linguistic and cultural dimensions of hegemony in no way exhaust Marxist consideration of the question in the 1920s, but were to some extent dependent upon these discussions. This has importance both in understanding the relationship of early Soviet thought to the former colonies of the USSR, but also in understanding some of the contours of the political situation in Ukraine today."
Heather Brown
Transcending Dualisms: Marx’s Philosophy of Nature and Labor
As the most recent report from the UN on Climate Change argues, it is no longer possible to ignore the effects of human destruction of the environment. Some form of climate change in the present is inevitable and will have significant impacts on various ecosystems and societies. The goal according to the UN International Panel on Climate change is in part to mitigate these effects. The question remains, however, how do we approach the human costs of climate change and the uneven effects of a reversal of this process? In recent years there has been a significant return to Marx to theorize questions of race, gender and economics in light of the contradictions and crises of late capitalism. The same has also been true of Marxist ecology. However, many of these recent studies take up particular aspects of Marx’s and/or Engels’s work relative to environmental concerns rather than provide a complete philosophical perspective of Marx’s ecology. These studies certainly do provide an important starting point for a Marxian ecological perspective that does not carry the burden of Soviet style anti-‐ecological development and in fact, illustrates that Marx’s perspectives on ecology could not be further away from these types of perspectives. Arguing that Marx and/or a Marxian perspective on the environment is compatible with
particular ecological concerns is not enough, however. If we are able to find an alternative to the rapacious nature of capitalist economic development that leaves many behind, then we must create a fully worked out philosophical perspective on ecology that takes account of various forms of human oppression as well. It is hoped that this paper will begin to fill this philosophical gap and show that Marx provided an outline for a theory of the human impact on the environment that is useful for today, albeit with some problematic aspects. Looking at the whole of Marx’s work, I argue that his continuing emphasis on overcoming dualisms and especially regarding humanity’s relation to nature provides a starting point for a theory of ecology that can account for both human effects on nature and the seemingly parallel oppression based on race, gender and class without privileging one aspect over the others.
Iain Bruce
"Climate Change, Pachamama and Socialism in the 21st Century"
"The paper will bring together three overlapping themes, in order to help understand one of the greatest opportunities, and dilemmas, for the international resistance to climate change.
1. Drawing on unpublished reports and original interviews with key participants, it will recount the intervention of the ALBA countries in the Copenhagen COP of 2009, when the leaders and delegations of Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba linked up with mobilizations outside the conference to block the attempt by the United States and others to impose a non-‐deal. It will examine how this led to the People’s Summit on Climate Change in Cochabamba in 2010, then how the stance subsequently weakened at Cancún and Durban.
2. It will look at how the indigenous and landless movements, with their practices and philosophies around the defence of Pachamama and ‘good living’ (buen vivir, sumak kawsay) helped to inform and put pressure on the stance of the ALBA governments, putting Latin America (for a time at least) at the forefront of the climate change movement.
3. Thirdly, it will look at the contradiction running through the middle of the Bolivarian-‐Alba processes, which combine the impulse of these movements with a deeply entrenched dependence on oil and gas, and powerful strands of developmentalist and extractivist economic policy. Contradictions which have led to direct confrontations in a number of cases.
Finally, the paper will seek to identify key challenges that would need to be overcome for the potential expressed at Copenhagen and Cochabamba to be recovered and continued.
Iain Bruce is a British journalist and film maker, formerly a BBC correspondent in Brazil and Venezuela, currently working as Executive Editor at Telesur in Caracas. He is the author/co-‐author of ‘The Porto Alegre Experience: direct democracy in Brazil’, Pluto Press,London,
2004; 'The Real Venezuela: making socialism in the 21st century', Pluto Press, London, 2009. Between 2010 and 2012 he made a series of four documentaries for Telesur on climate change issues in Latin America. He also contributes on Latin America to International Viewpoint and is a supporter of Socialist Resistance.
Dick Bryan Michael Rafferty
Re-‐thinking employment through finance
"In the growing literature on ‘financialization’, there is little engagement with the labour market. That which exists focuses predominantly on the idea of shareholder value, and a competitive pressure that comes into a workplace, with direct ramifications for labour. But here finance expresses analytically as an exogenous pressure. So how do we think of employment, and the appropriation of surplus value, as a process into which financial modes of calculation have entered. In particular, how do we frame the pricing of risk, and strategy shifting of risk in the employment context (and how does the conception of surplus value itself change when we consider the pricing of risk)?
In this paper, we try to think employment through the discourse of finance, both to feature the pricing and trading of risk -‐ a process that needs to be integrated into the conception of surplus value – and so that the analysis of class in relation to ‘financialization’ can be advanced. At the moment, finance and class operate on quite different analytical terrains. To think the connections requires that there be ways to frame each in relation to the other via more than the discipline of shareholder value. Accordingly, this paper frames employment and surplus value via the categories of options and swaps, so that these connections might be explored."
Tom Bunyard
'Dialectical, Strategic Thought': An Outline of the Model of Praxis that Supports Guy Debord's Theory of 'Spectacle'
Guy Debord’s famous concept of ‘spectacle’ is perhaps one of the most widely misunderstood and misappropriated ideas in contemporary theory. This paper will respond to that problem by offering a clarification of the concept, advanced via a discussion of the philosophical positions that inform Debord’s often dense formulations. Through doing so, the paper will show that the conceptual framework that the theory rests upon possesses far greater sophistication and complexity than is often acknowledged, insofar as it contains the following, still largely ignored components: 1) a philosophical anthropology; 2) a speculative philosophy of history; 3) an ethics; 4) the rudiments of an epistemology; 5) an idiosyncratic version of Hegelian Marxism; 6) a dialectical conception of strategy. Through outlining those elements the essay will advance the following, broader argument. Debord’s work is best understood as a 20th Century re-‐articulation of the classical 19th Century concern with realising philosophy in lived praxis; after all, the heralded supersession of spectacular
representation, in all of its various formulations within his thought, essentially revolves around the need to begin consciously making history, as opposed to merely contemplating and interpreting its results. Therefore, if his theory is indeed to be viewed as having become ‘more relevant than ever’, as many of his more enthusiastic commentators would have it, then that key orientation towards praxis should form part of its purported relevance. The paper will show that such a claim to pertinence can indeed be made: that whilst the theory may be of limited value as an account of modern capitalism, the model of praxis that one can draw from its conceptual mechanics – a model that amounts, we will argue, to a highly politicised ethics – may, nonetheless, be of contemporary interest.
Florian Butollo
The Transformation of the Chinese Economy – A Leap beyond Cheap Labour?
China´s current growth pattern is ridden with contradictions. Excessive reliance on investments and exports has brought about macroeconomic imbalances while a proliferation of workers struggles is indicating the limits of the authoritarian model of control. Since over a decade, the Chinese government therefore seeks to refurbish the growth model by a combined policy effort for industrial upgrading and the promotion of harmonious labour relations. This presentation attempts to assess the perspectives of the reform programme with an awareness of its structural limitations. These consist of a uneven global economic structure that may impede a progress towards knowledge-‐intensive production models, as well as an internal power structure with strong ties to the established “extensive” regime of accumulation. On the other hand, growth of the domestic market, state involvement in industrial upgrading and technology development, and a “vertical clustering” of industries create favourable conditions for industrial upgrading. The evolving political economy thus shows contradictory tendencies in which there is a proliferation of high-‐tech industries and advanced manufacturing on the one hand and a persistence of cheap labour segments and authoritarian type of industrial relations on the other. Our analysis tries to come to terms with these contradictory tendencies and assess their implications for economic development and social conflict.
Damien Cahill
Neoliberal Doctrine as Ideology
Recent scholarship on neoliberalism has drawn attention to the role played by neoliberal doctrines and think tanks in the neoliberal transformation of states and economies since the 1970s. Much of this scholarship has accorded a strong independent causal role to neoliberal doctrines in the making of neoliberal policies. Concurrently however, several scholars have also noted discrepancies between neoliberal doctrines and actually existing neoliberal policies and economic changes. This paper proposes that a historical materialist framework is uniquely placed to understand both the important role played by neoliberal doctrines in
the roll out of neoliberal policy, as well as why actually existing neoliberalism is not simply a mirror of neoliberal doctrines. It argues that the role played by neoliberal doctrines in the roll out of actually existing neoliberalism is best appreciated if such doctrines are read as ideology. The paper draws upon Marx’s distinction between essence and appearance in Capital to argue that neoliberal doctrines are ideological in the sense that they offer both a partial reflection of transformations to capitalist economies since the 1970s, as well as masking the key social relations at the heart of such transformations.
Ankica Cakardic
Theory of accumulation and Luxemburgian analysis of reproductive labour and current crises
"While writing “An Anti-‐Critique: The Accumulation of Capital, or What the Epigones have Made of Marx’s Theory” where she very concisely outlines her thesis on capital accumulation Rosa Luxemburg argues that the economic roots of imperialism can be derived from the accumulation of capital and that imperialism in general represents a specific mode of accumulation. From that point onwards she will develop her critique of Marx, especially when it comes to the third part of the second volume of ""Capital"" where Marx analyses the question of reproduction.
With a summary review of this discussion, we will try to see whether it is possible to offer a Luxemburgian analysis of the current crisis, and reflect on the methodological and theoretical framework we would need to consider. In the end we will try to use this instrument for the materialistic analysis of women's reproductive labor and its economic role in the accumulation of capital, taking into account the relation between the productive and unproductive labor as it is decomposed in Rosa Luxemburg’s several texts from 1902nd to 1914th."
Lindberg Campos Filho
The fight against Brazilian capitalist patriarchy and racism: exploitation, rape culture and urban lynchings
The aim of this paper is an analysis of the intensification of exploitation by early twentieth-‐first century Brazilian capitalism through homo and transphobia, sexism and racism in the light of the formation of Brazilian bourgeois society in late nineteenth century. I analyse a number of different examples from mass culture and of social dynamics and practices, for instance, the first gay kiss in a nationwide soap opera broadcast, the widespread Brazilian sexism, the increasing visibility of lynchings in urban peripheries and domestic workers's working conditions. These realities reveal that Brazilian capitalism combines oppression with exploitation in order to sophisticate and legitimise the latter. In addition to that, I take into consideration the process of transition from slavery based to a mass consumption society in the turn of the century to highlight the specific and local conditions that made
such social structure possible. I briefly evaluate the corresponding responses given by social movements and revolutionary organizations in Brazil and possible perspectives. Even though it can be observed a series of significant advancements, especially in terms of LGBT visibility and racial oppression, capitalist accumulation and private property are untouched which, I argue, are the real basis of oppression and one of the reasons why Brazilian capitalism still survives. I use theoretical frameworks provided by cultural materialist critics such as Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Roberto Schwarz, Antonio Candido and Maria Elisa Cevasco in order to deepen this analysis.
Cagri Carikci
Neoliberal Transformation of the State, Class Struggle and Capital: Lessons from Privatisation of Turkey’s Mining Sector
"The issue of privatisation in public sector and its effects on the relations between the state, capital and classes have been broadly discussed in recent years. This paper aims to make a critical analysis of the privatisation in the mining sector in Turkey during the Justice and Development Party (AKP) period to identify the specific political policies and strategies AKP has pursued in this process and their implications on the state’s neoliberal transformation. Within this framework, this paper will analyse the place of the mining sector in Turkey’s economy and explain the significance of the privatisation process in terms of reproduction of labour and class struggle.
An effort will be made to express, through a two-‐way dynamic analysis, the influence of the state regulation over social relations and the impact of class struggle –which is implicit in the way the society functions– on the state, institutions and reforms. Also an emphasis will be laid on the importance of the relations and conflict between different fractions of capital during the AKP period.
The paper concludes that behind these privatisations lies a political process, which has deepened the domination of the capital over the state."
Samuel Carlshamre
History, Heritage, science and ideology: Marxist Arabic Turath-‐studies post-‐1967
"This presentation is to examine the relationships between Heritage and History, science and ideology in the writings of a number of Arabic Marxist historians in the period between 1967 and 1991, in the cultural journal al-‐Tariq, belonging to the Lebanese Communist Party. While the issue of coming to terms with the cultural, religious and philosophical Heritage (turath) of Arabic-‐Islamic civilisation had been an important part of Arabic cultural and political discussions at least since the beginning of the nahda in the middle of the 19th century, the defeat of the Arab states in the 1967 June war against Israel ushered in an era of crisis, and thus renewed focus on the issue, culminating throughout the late 1970s and
early 1980s in a number of multi-‐volume studies of the subject written from a Marxist perspective.
In this presentation, however, the focus will lie rather on the debates and discussions carried out in al-‐Tariq, debates in which, more clearly perhaps than the monographs, the internal deliberations and conflicts within the Marxist circles came to be highlighted. For the writers involved in these debates – such as Husayn Muruwwah, Tayyib Tizini, Mahdi Amil, Tawfiq Sallum and many more – the subject in itself presented a number of problems, such the questions of relationship of base and superstructure, ideology and scientificity, use and truth in the writing of history, and not least that of the relationship between the very categories or knowledge objects of History and Heritage themselves. In this relationship is highlighted the potentially conflicting uses and functions of (writing about) the past, tentatively formulated as the tension between identity formation (Heritage) and scientific knowledge (History).
In this paper, then, the focus will be on the very foundations of the Arabic discourse about Heritage from a Marxist perspective. From a theoretical view point grounded in the ideas of Historical Materialism – with pretence to represent actual, scientific knowledge about the past – what use could there be in approaching such a object of knowledge? If not discarded altogether, then how did it need to be transformed, to become manageable by the theoretical tools of Marxism? What is the relationship that is to be established between the past and the present to be, and how does it compare to other such formulations, represented by non-‐Marxist writers on the subject? Is the project at hand fundamentally one of negative critique, or of positive re-‐appropriation?
While this discussion can shed light on some important specific issues and predicaments of Arabic society and the left in these societies, it also ties in with questions and theories of a decidedly universal validity, such as the relationship between materiality and culture, cultural heritage and history, as developed not least by Marxist theoreticians such as Frederic Jameson and Walter Benjamin."
Thomas Carmichael
The Aesthetic Ideology of the Later Althusser
"In the ‘Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-‐philosophes,’ recently published in France, a text composed in the late 1970s, contemporaneous with his several meditations on the crisis in the historical Communist movement and his turn to the major late texts on aleatory materialism, Althusser argues that the “The ‘escape into art’ is perhaps the equivalent of the ‘escape into religion’: a way of finding an imaginary solution to the real difficulties that societies confront’ [Translation mine].
However, that critique of ‘artistic practice’ would appear to be at odds with his conception of the role of the aesthetic and the aesthetically interpellated collective that informs much
of his late work on aleatory materialism. Consider, for example, the role that Althusser assigns to culture in his own work. In his unpublished 1982 interview with Richard Hyland, Althusser asserts that he considers his essay “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht,” one of the better things that he has ever written: “Je crois que c’est une des meilleures choses que j’ai écrites” (Althusser, “Conversation avec Richard Hyland” 2 juillet 1982, IMEC Fonds Althusser ALT2. A46.-‐05.03, p. 32). If we are inclined to heed that the observation Étienne Balibar makes in his remarks at Althusser’s funeral that For Marx is Althusser’s one great book, then we might reasonably ask ourselves, as this chapter considers, why Althusser would value so highly the theatre essay in that book, an essay that seems to so many as secondary to “Contradiction and Overdetermination” or “On the Materialist Dialectic” (Balibar, Écrits, 121).
My paper also takes up the questions posed in Althusser’s own unpublished notes. In his unpublished 1966 reflections on Macherey’s “Pour une théorie de la production littéraire, for example, the phrases “nécessité libre,” “rencontre de nécissités,” “du clinamen,” and “théorie de la rencontre” appear prominently, in part in response to Macherey’s own discussion of necessity in A Theory of Literary Production (Althusser, “Notes sur le livre de Pierre Macherey: Pour une théorie de la production littéraire 1966.” IMEC Fonds Althusser). As the notes on Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production would indicate, the terms that will guide the logic of Althusser’s late thought often appear early, and these terms appear most often in the field of cultural analysis.
Matteo Cavallaro
Towards a political economy of radical right parties
According to Alesina et al. (2001), anti-‐immigrant sentiment and racist views can play a role in undermining public support for public sector. Roemer et al. (2007) furtherly deveoped this idea estimating the loss of public expenditure caused by widespread racist feelings. Their works, however, mainly focus on the trade-‐off between individual preferences, thus leaving unsolved other questions such as: to what extent do these attitudes have concrete effects on the economy? What is the role of radical right parties ? And what can we say of social blocks behind those parties? Goal of this work is to present a thorough review of political determinants in economics, from the neoclassical interpretation to the approaches focusing on individual attitudes. On the other hand, I wish to introduce a plan for an integrated study linking social classes, radical right parties and economic policy keeping in mind that “Policy requires politics” (Gourevitch 1986 : 1). In particular, two (both “Gramscian”) streams seem useful reach this goal, namely the social blocks approach developed during the last years by Amable et al. (2003, 2005, 2006 and 2012) and the marxist theory of the state as proposed by Jessop (2002 and 2006). Developing and unifying these approaches could prove to be insightful in understanding the role of radical right, as well as other political forces, in capitalist ecomies.
Riccardo Cavallo
The Commons’ Revolution: the Italian Case.
This paper analyses the new attempts at resistance to neoliberalism spread implemented in Italy in recent times. If, on the one hand, global capitalism seems to survive thanks to the new practices and tools, on the other hand, in some countries there are developing new forms of opposition to the dominance of the capital. The Italian case stands in this complex scenario, where the theoretical work on the commons of a group of scholars (mostly jurists and economists), has not been confined to the lecture rooms but it has had significant practical implications of giving rise to a veritable proliferation of socio-‐political movements, whose struggles in defence of commons and, in particular, against the privatization of water resources, ended with the victory of a popular referendum in 2011. Since a so unexpected victory, we should examine some aspects of the protection of common goods, starting from the fundamental question summed up as follows: the collective government of the commons could be a revolutionary in order to way out of the suffocating logic of private property as a new form of class struggle or, on the contrary, it is likely to remain entangled in the same neoliberal ideology?
Paromita Chakrabarti
Between Capitalism and Imperialism: Subaltern Feminist Resistance and Struggle in Mahashweta Devi’s Breast Stories
The history of India’s emergence from a colony to a post colonial nation state is marked by the narrative of people’s struggle and agency. However, what is silenced in this narrative are certain moments of confrontation that marks this transition. This confrontation was not simply between the colonizer and the colonized but between the bourgeois nationalists who began to assert power after independence and the tribals or indigenous people who fiercely resisted being proletarized. Subaltern protests and peasant rebellion against state authority, multinational corporations’ land grabbling ventures and institutional tolerance of spectacular sexual violence against lower caste women have continued to expose the fault lines of Indian democracy.
This paper discusses Mahashweta Devi’s radical writings which tell the stories of subaltern women in India who are caught in the cycle of violence, exploitation and oppression as body, worker and object; and are yet able to resist the deep seated caste prejudices, destabilize the notions of victim and violator, and question the hegemonic homogeneity that symbolize the idea of India. Although Literature has long ceased to be the most effective medium of social criticism and the advancement of alternative visions, it remains an important source of intervention, especially in the Indian context, particularly because literature is able to focus on questions glossed over by more capital-‐intensive media. The intersection of class exploitation and features of caste and sexual oppression that are
explored in the work of Mahashweta Devi, articulates a position that is simultaneously Marxist and Feminist, as well as advancing the perspectives of subaltern social groups. Devi’s Breast Stories (trans.1997) uses the site of the transgressive female body to represent radical aesthetics, launching a stringent critique of Indian nationalism, its imperial invasive ventures into the tribal (indigenous) and peasant lands and its capitalist exploitation of the productive subaltern female body for elite consumption. I argue that Mahashweta Devi’s Breast Stories represent the subaltern woman’s struggle and resistance against the intrusions of the capitalist market economy and the rise of violent quasi-‐imperial modes of domination and subjugation.
Devi’s work constitutes a dialectical engagement with subaltern women’s oppression, its roots in structures of exploitation and strategies for liberation. This is apparent when she subverts and appropriates the ancient Hindu epics to serve the cause of subaltern protest against the combined force of state violence, the bramhinical social order, patriarchal oppression and capitalist exploitation in the form of the persistence of bonded labour. In a compelling revisionist strategy, Devi’s literary appropriation of the figure of Draupadi, the polyandrous wife of the Pandavas as Dopdi, serves as a critique of the violent and exploitative Indian state and a mark of subaltern female agency. Central figures in her narrative serve to subvert the grand narrative of motherhood and maternal nourishment and allegorize the oppressive legacies of patriarchal demands on the female body as commodity. By rewriting the figure of the sacred wife and mother, Devi problematises the image of the Indian state as a secular, democratic and progressive republic and exposes the reality of exclusion, exploitation and erasure of the subaltern female that such a state regularly practices. Reading Devi’s work as a Marxist feminist critique of neo-‐imperialism and capitalism has particular importance in our times for two reasons: her writings have inspired protests by tribal women’s groups against the Indian State in areas like Manipur among others, and it gives her readers critical insight into India’s aggressive capitalist market oriented economic policy, the politics of sexual crimes that are committed by the upper caste men against women particularly from the lower caste in the name of social justice, and the dangerous shift of the political debate on cultural nationalism to the right.
Vincent Chanson
Politicizing Theory : Philosophy and Praxis in critical marxism from Korsch to Krahl.
In this paper, my aim will be to examine “Western Marxism” concept with a quite different approach than Perry Anderson’s classical category. While in the famous Anderson’s book “Wester Marxism” is assimilated to a pessimistic critique of the proletariat praxis, to a philosophizing estrangement of the classical marxian critique of political economy, i’ll argue quite differently that we can find another undercurrent in this tradition, which leads us to a new type of theory and praxis unity concept. From Karl Korsch seminal text “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923) to Hans-‐Jürgen Krahl “Konstitution und Klassenkampf” (1971), the problem of the realization of philosophy is revisited in an experimental and subversive way.
Philosophic statements become here directly politicized : a new dialectical conceptuality oversteps traditional marxism, critical self-‐reflexion becomes the core of a new strategic rationality. Far away from Adorno’s skepticism and tragic philosophy of history, revolutionary perspective in late capitalism is for Krahl in a new interpretation of 1920’s dialectical marxism (Lukacs, Korsch) grounded. That’s why Critical Theory could, in opposition to the habermassian orientation, give us some political and organizational orientations, directly coming from a new synthesis between “critical marxism” and german idealism.
Vincent Chanson is PHD Student (Nanterre University/ SOPHIAPOL). He is the coordinator (with Frédéric Monferrand and Alexis Cukier) of “La Réification, Histoire et actualité d’un concept critique” (La Dispute, 2014) and the author of many articles about critical theory (Adorno, Benjamin, Lukacs, Jameson) and marxist aesthetic."
Greig Charnock & Ramon Ribera-‐Fumaz
The Limits to Capital in Spain
Perhaps nowhere better exemplifies ‘how capital survives’ better than the European South, where states’ crisis management strategies since 2009 have amounted to what some have termed ‘austericide’. This paper will explain the crisis in Spain by tracing the essential features of the development of Spanish political economy – paying particular attention to the reproduction of a mass of ‘small capitals’ before and after the insertion of Spain into the New International Division of Labour from the 1970s. While stressing that crisis has been a necessary and periodically recurring feature of this development, the paper also highlights how crisis as ‘normality’ is intrinsically linked to the project of European Monetary Union through the politics of ‘internal devaluation’ and widespread struggles over the reproduction of the working class.
Olivier Chassaing
Legal Form Theory and Criminal Law Criticism
At least since the end of the XVIIIth century, the legal institutions that settle and operate repression of forbidden conducts have been approached from the historical perspective of their never-‐ending reforms, or of their abolition. Therefore, a number of critical studies about state repression and criminal law have tried to argue that existing historical institutions could not be abstractly rubbed out, and showed instead the productive, useful and indeed inevitable character of transgression and its repression, following Marx’s dictum of the social benefits of crime (Theories of Surplus-‐Value). In particular, Rushe and Kirchheimer analysed the penal pattern through which economic structure impacts upon law and makes it a key-‐tool of labour discipline and broader exploitation (Punishment and Social Structure). More essentialy, Pachukanis’ account of criminalization and punishment traced the deeper legal form at its rise, namely the commodity form, and argued that law
becomes a formal condition to reproduce capitalism and reinforce its social hierarchy. Thus, penal pattern and commodity form theory offer two different ways to understand the connection between criminalization and penalty on one side, and exploitation and social domination on the other. Those two options can be defined as structural subordination and agentivity of criminal law – since law expresses and shapes class struggle. I would like to question these various theories of legal form in order to identify the principle of legality criticism that structures those critical theories of crime (wether they be engaged with a restorative justice or with an abolitionnist framework).
François Chesnais
The notion of finance capital and the contemporary operations of TNCs
"The exploration of capital's capacity to survive requires a re-‐examination of the notion of finance capital as an initial necessary step. Finance capital refers to something more, and infinitely more formidable than just capital operating in financial markets. In the contemporary conditions of the globalisation of capital, it designates the process and consequences of the centralisation and concentration of industrial, banking and merchant capital alike and their intermeshing. Contemporary finance capital is in combination “productive capital” lodged in industrial corporations, all of them transnational corporations (TNCs), “money capital” centralised in very large and powerful financial conglomerates (financial capital) and merchant and commercial capital embodied in the conglomerates operating in both in commodities proper and in final commercialisation.
Once this has been posited the analysis will focus on TNCs. If today capitalism continues to be capable of containing the effects of the world crisis, in the case of the advanced capitalist countries it is due in large part to the scale of value and surplus production through foreign direct investment and the intensification of exploitation taking place under TNC corporate management operating on a global level. The configuration of foreign production has continually evolved from the 1960s onwards. It has been marked by a continuous extension from the direct production of value and surplus value by TNCs to their appropriation of surplus value from other firms. Global vertical supply chains appeared in the early 1990s, followed by ever more complex “value chains”, first among TNC affiliates and then increasing through offshoring with medium and small firms often situated in a large number of countries."
Danielle Child
From Labia to Labour: an alternative to the performed body in mid-‐1970s’ feminist art
"From 1973 to 1975, three women artists – Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt and Mary Kelley – undertook a study of (mainly women) workers in a Bermondsey metal box factory. The project was born out of their engagement with the Women’s Workshop of the Artist’s Union and was more akin to a sociological study than ‘art’, producing detailed data on the lives of
these workers. The research culminated in an installation, exhibited under the title Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry (1973-‐5) at the South London Art Gallery. The piece was to evidence the inequality between the men and women who worked at the factory.
The work is dubbed as a ‘feminist’ project due to the artists whom undertook the research and the subject of the project. This paper will consider the work as a departure from the dominant models of feminist art of the mid-‐1970s in which the female body is performed. Through examining the types of labour -‐ performed labour, labour as knowledge creation and the actual labour of the subject (creating value through extracting surplus) -‐ it will be argued that this London-‐based group undertook a more affective feminist critique through its ‘knowledge’ creation."
Juan Chingo
The geopolitics of the current international crisis: neo-‐Kautskyism or inter-‐imperialist rivalries?
"The current crisis has not yet brought about a significant geopolitical transformation as was the case with the 1929 crisis, which Isaac Johsua characterises as ‘a crisis of American emergence’. The catastrophic economic conditions of the 1929 crisis meant that the United Kingdom was incapable of playing its old stabilising role and the United States, despite its rapid advance, was incapable of replacing the UK. In 1931, neither power was able to intervene to prevent the German banking crisis or the collapse of sterling, events that contributed to the Second World War. In the current crisis, by contrast, we have seen not only massive state intervention to rescue the bankrupt financial system, but also the prominent role played by the Federal Reserve, followed by the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan, to prevent the crisis from becoming another Great Depression.
As a consequence, the first phase of this on-‐going crisis has reinforced an incorrect view: one that overestimates America’s leading role in a ‘collective imperialism’ to manage global capitalism, which in the latter part of the 20th Century replaced imperialist rivalries (including wars). Although it is true that there is no hegemon to replace American dominance, this paper will attempt to demonstrate, against these neo-‐Kautskyist views, that the difficulty in achieving hegemonic succession lies in the historical features of American supremacy, which are qualitatively different from those of Britain in the 19th Century; and that, in spite of some inertia (dollar primacy, rehabilitation of the IMF, etc), the crisis of American hegemony might be causing a widening gap inside the ‘core’, in particular with the new, post-‐reunification Germany. This paper will also analyse possible scenarios for the future of inter-‐state relationships, taking into account the rise of China and the limitations on its growth."
Joseph Choonara
Deskilling and the two-‐fold nature of skill
"The category of skilled labour is an important feature of two areas associated with Marxist theory: Marx’s labour theory of value (LTV) and labour process theory (LPT).
Within LTV, debate surrounds the mechanism through which the value created by skilled labour is reduced to that of simple labour, and the relationship between the extra value skilled labour creates and the extra value that must be advanced to produce or reproduce the skilled labour power. Marx’s own writings on this subject in Capital and the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy are brief and open to various interpretations. Arguably Marx’s account was sufficient for the period in which he was writing, in which a mass of more or less interchangeable labourers with minimal training was developing in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. Today, it would be hard to defend such a position.
Within LPT, Braverman’s account in Labor and Monopoly Capital has been criticised for his portrayal of “deskilling” as an inevitable outcome of a battle between capital and labour for control of the labour process. But the resulting debates in LPT pay little attention to LTV. In most of the well-‐known contributions to the debate on deskilling, value simply does not feature in any rigorous manner. Instead the focus is on concrete qualities of labour processes, such as the variety of tasks performed by workers, their degree of autonomy, their level of education and training, and so on. Many of the leading exponents of LPT reject value theory altogether.
Making sense of these arguments requires that we reinstate value in the conceptualisation of the labour process. Marx argues that labour power has a two-‐fold character, generating both values and use-‐values. I shall propose an account that considers the two-‐fold nature of skilled labour power. In this approach, concrete expressions of skilled labour are subordinated to the drive to generate and appropriate surplus value by capital, which is engaged in a competitive battle of accumulation. The drive to deskill, or to enhance the skills of, labour can be understood in this framework. At the same time, it is today necessary to focus not on the individual worker as bearer of “simple labour”, but the collective labourer as a composite formed of different individual labour powers.
This reformulation provides a basis for a reassessment of Braverman’s deskilling thesis, one that is more sensitive to the various counter-‐tendencies that generate new areas of skilled labour."
Rossana Cillo
The struggles of immigrant workers in the logistics and freight transport sectors in Italy
"Since 2008 the logistics and freight transport sectors in Italy have been affected by an increasing number of strikes, that have been successful thanks to the organization activities by the independent trade union Si-‐Cobas and the self-‐activation of precarious immigrant
workers employed in the co-‐operative enterprises of the subcontracting system. At different times the most important logistics hubs of Northern Italy (such as Bologna and Padua) and some of the most important multinational corporations in the logistics (TNT, DHL, GLS, SDA, Bartolini...), in the large-‐scale distribution (Coop, Esselunga, Ikea) and in food industry (Granarolo) have been blocked.
Even if state and employers have reacted with a severe repression, these strikes represent by far the most important struggles that have developed in Italy as a result of the crisis and the very first attempt to organize a workers struggle outside the social-‐democratic unions, which are more and more accepting compromises with capital at the national level."
Alexandru Cistelecan & Dana Domsodi
The Messianic Time of Value. On The Political Theology of the new Wertkritik
"This paper attempts to critically evaluate the philosophical premises and practical consequences of the new Wertkritik (Postone, Kurz, Jappe etc.) that are responsible for its oscillation between a non-‐historical materialism and a historical non-‐materialism (formalism). The contemporary interest in this new theory of value is due to the fact that it responds particularly well to the double nature of our present predicament: the global crisis of capitalism, together with the evident absence of a really existing social alternative, reflected into the core arguments of this theory: the bitter emphasis on the inescapable and impersonal unfolding of the logic of value and the acute irrelevance of the subjective factor.
The first part will critically discuss some of the philosophical premises of this intellectual direction, namely the articulation between time, history and revelation. Briefly, it will be argued that this reading of Marx’s theory of value entails a direct leap from history (the contingent birth of capitalism in England) to a fatal and teleological process of unfolding and revelation of the logic of value. Thus history is merely the intra-‐apocalyptic distance between the revelation of its abstract logic and final realization. A sort of messianic time which strikingly resembles Fukuyama’s post-‐history.
This highly metaphysical touch is also visible in the practical consequences that this theory entails. On the one hand, an unexplainable rediscovered subjectivism, as program for the post-‐capitalist future (already present), and, on the other hand, the retreat into communitaristic and non-‐mediated forms of social organization, caused by the theory’s hasty and risky identification of value with social abstraction as such."
Nicola Clewer
How capitalism survives: The neoliberal monument?
"The means by which capitalism survives, the machinations in which it must always engaged, include ideological and cultural as much as do social and economic transformations. Since the early 1980s, alongside the rise of neoliberalism, there has been a
below them to increasing competition for work. Sometimes proletarians are forced out of work altogether, joining the ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ or perhaps are exorcised entirely into the surplus population. A lucid analysis of the dynamics of proletarianisation is crucial for understanding the underlying social conditions that accompany or enable the survival of capitalism."
Constantinou Constantinos & Leandros Savvides
The scientific management of migration in Cyprus: the racialisation of labor
In Cyprus, a historically multicultural island that was ‘homogenized’ for the purposes of forming a nation-‐state in 1960, the rising issue of racism today is considered as an issue of crisis, an oversimplified approach that encapsulates ideas such that the unemployment created by the economic crisis that struck the island has created tendencies against foreigners who ‘steal’ the jobs of the locals. But if that is true, then Norway’s Breivik incident would be inconceivable as well as the rise of the far right even in the most well-‐off European countries such as the Scandinavian. With increased employment for Turkish Cypriots “across the divide” and a significant influx of migrants to assigned sectors, there is a worry of the loss of national identity as well as the loss of economic opportunities by Cypriots, especially young unemployed labour. We claim that the case of Cyprus indicates how racism in times of crisis is a symptom of long-‐ standing structures of racism that have been developed over the course of years through a management of migration (which created a vast underclass) that was adopted to suit the needs of capital. Explanations can be found in the objective structured mechanics of institutions and the intersubjective dynamics of capital, ideology and race.
Terry Conway
No pinkwashing
"This paper situates the development of a conscious strategy of Pinkwashing by the Israeli state in the context of the broader hasbara/Brand Israel campaign; playing on the growth of Islamaphobia and anti-‐Arab prejudice in the post-‐9/11 period. It will explore why the LGBTQ communities – particular gay men -‐ are seen as a target for this propaganda and discuss the concept of homonationalism in this context.
It will situate pinkwashing, as all aspects of the ideological offensive of the Israeli state in the complete obliteration of any agency of the Palestinian people. LGBTQ Palestinians only exist in this grotesque fantasy as ‘victims’ apparently fleeing to the apparently safe haven of Israel – to distract from and normalize the settler colonial and apartheid reality that the state of Israel has established on the ground which oppresses all Palestinians regardless of sexuality or gender identity.
It will explore some of the campaigning tactics used by anti-‐ Pinkwashing activists particularly in Britain but drawing on experiences in the USA, Canada, Portugal and the Netherlands including links with LGBTQ Palestinian organisations. It will discuss the extent to which such activism has impacted on Palestine solidarity campaigning and LGBTQ activism.
It is submitted as part of the Marxist-‐feminist stream and relates to topics on homonationalism, racism and islamaphobia and queer subjects listed as topics for the stream"
Estelle Cooch
Blurred lines and Trojan horses
"Numerous authors have written on the links between the victories won by second wave feminism and their consequent manipulation by neoliberal ideology throughout the 1980s. This paper is the product of extensive interviews with current and past university feminist society presidents and interviews with those at the heart of organising the burgeoning new movement in the UK – SlutWalk, UK Feminista, Object, International Union of Sexworkers etc.
It will provide quantitative evidence looking at what the new feminists have taken from the second wave and to what extent they think the victories won; choice, sexual freedom and financial independence, have allowed capitalism to reconstitute itself in a more vicious form. Was feminism a Trojan horse for what has been termed the “new sexism”. It will attempt to chart the relationship of the women’s movement to other movements
It will ask if the largely anti-‐racist nature of the movement in the UK is related to the rise of the anti-‐war movement in the early 2000s. It will also consider if the class basis to slut shaming that was identified in a recent study published in Social Psychology Quarterly in the US is equally applicable to the UK. It will consider how we can transform the more atomised new feminism into a real social movement. It will conclude by looking at the way in which new feminists attempt to link personal liberation with social transformation.
Authors considered include Cinzia Arruza, Nancy Fraser, Gail Dines, Laura Bates"
Matthew Cooper
We are not all multiculturalists now: the recasting of multiculturalism as state policy in Britain since 2001.
We are not all multiculturalists now: the recasting of multiculturalism as state policy in Britain since 2001.
There is, even within the left, no agreed understanding of the state policy of multiculturalism. This paper will attempt to move towards a source based history of multiculturalism in Britain.
Initially multiculturalism was a policy (or perhaps little more than a series of rhetorical political stances) pursued by political actors in a period of post-‐colonial migration which attempted to manage the position of racialised minorities within class society. The body of this paper will attempt to understand how popular and popularist narratives of the failure of such multiculturalism have developed in Britain since the mid-‐1980s.
This critique from the right coincided with a changing context. If multiculturalism in its first phase was linked to post-‐colonial migration, in this second phase the deep context was given by the increasing dominance of neo-‐liberal ideas and the globalised economy in which migration was no longer the legacy of Empire. Multiculturalism became a fractured set of policies, some only in the imagination of its opponents, mutating through decisive moments such as the Rushdie affair of 1989 to the riots of 2001 and 9/11.
This paper will conclude with an examination of how diversity is understood in terms of state policy in the period since 2001 in the context of the 'war on terror' and the evolving paradigm of community cohesion."
Luke Cooper
Beyond the so-‐called ‘Russian question’: twentieth century communism reconsidered
"Few questions have been more contested amongst Marxists than that concerned with the nature of the state socialist regimes of the last century. Despite the manifest differences between the various competing paradigms on the categorization of these regimes, it is the shared assumptions that underpinned the debate which arguably require the most radical reconsideration. The shorthand to which the debate was frequently referred, ‘the Russian question’, encapsulates these problems, for it carried with it two dubious implicit presuppositions. Firstly, it was assumed that a model of politics and economy developed as a result of largely endogenous challenges faced by Russian society in the 1920s and 1930s. As such, arguments tended to focus merely on the timing and class dynamic of a process treated as essentially internal. Secondly, each paradigm also tended to presuppose that this social structure was largely duplicated in those revolutions that came after; a fallacy that lead, in turn, to a further tendency for those variations in facets which were recognised, to be judged against the supposed ‘norm’ of the Russian-‐Soviet model. This paper pursues a recasting of twentieth century communism ‘in power’ as a truly global phenomenon in its origins and scope. It argues that by locating Stalinist states within the explosive contradictions of uneven and combined development a less Eurocentric and more historically sensitive understanding of the communism of the last century can be elaborated. This thesis is pursued through an engagement with John Kautsky’s seminal, but
all too often overlooked, The Political Consequences of Modernization, and the contemporary literature concerned to creatively re-‐elaborate the theory of uneven and combined development.
Ludmila Costhek Abílio
Emerging on two wheels: Brazilian economic development and labour exploitation
The rise of minimum wage, of the rate of formal work and of the credit to low income population has enabled the Brazilian government to establish an official speech and propaganda about ‘new Brazilian middle class’. This definition is fully disconnected to work conditions, labour exploitation or lifestyles; on the other hand, the celebration of a ‘new middle class’’ is entirely connected to the consolidation of a Brazilian neodevelopment ideology. Based on an empirical analysis of the motorcycle couriers in the City of Sao Paulo combined with the analysis of this official speech, I discuss the connections between labour exploitation and economic development. These workers annihilate space by time with their own bodies, in a very risky way. This very precarious work – which is typically associated with this ‘new middle class’ -‐ plays a key role to the realisation of the demands of finances and services that take place at the ‘global city’. The principal aims are: 1.To discuss the disappearance of labour as a reference in the definition of the so called “new Brazilian middle class”; 2. To present a broader analysis of the intricate relation between the very explicit although obfuscated forms of labour exploitation and Brazilian development.
Emily Cousens& Sarah Pine
Cognitive Capitalism and the Instrumentalization of Sexuality as Vulnerability
Contemporary capitalism is characterized by the shift from material to ‘immaterial’ or ‘cognitive’ regimes of accumulation. Drawing on Hardt and Negri we will explore the centrality of affective labour to the production of immaterial value. Women’s roles have historically involved the majority of emotional or affective labour, meaning this shift has led to the qualitative, as well as heavily studied quantitative, feminization of labour. Wittig argues that women are the category of sex; they are made into sex itself. Women’s sexuality produces surplus and exchange value within cognitive capitalism, thereby helping capitalism to survive. We draw on Skeggs’ work to explore how women have access to a source of cultural capital in performing their sexuality and utilize it for their role in the workplace. Women must perform that sexuality which is considered valuable. We will explore the nature of ‘feminine’ sexuality as a necessarily oppositional norm; characterized by vulnerability in opposition to ‘masculine’ dominance. Those who cannot approximate this norm of sexuality as vulnerability; the working class, are depicted as having abject sexuality. This may be commodified as spectacle but results in further exclusion from the workforce and citizenry more generally.
Bill Crane
From Class Struggle to Class Compromise: The Contradictions of Kerala's Developmental State
"From the 1990s onwards, the ""Kerala model of development"" was a figure lauded by left-‐wing scholars and observers of the development process. The Communist-‐led state, it was thought, had found a road to prosperity while promoting human rights, the freedom of women and the lower castes, and access to health and education as well as a healthy democratic culture.
More recent studies historicize Kerala's ""model"" of development by pointing to the circumstances that gave rise to it, including a weak capitalist class and a strong labour movement. Critical work has been done showing that the ""Kerala model"" has continually failed to address gender, caste and class differences. As Kerala's neoliberal transformation continues, these critiques can only gain power.
My paper seeks an explanation of the genesis of the Kerala model. Focusing centrally on the rise of agrarian radicalism led by the CP(M) in the 1970s and the consolidation of a labour-‐compromise on the plantations. Drawing on Marxist understandings of social-‐democracy from Milliband to Brenner and Przeworski, I explain ""how capitalism survived"" Kerala's model, a class-‐compromise laden with contradictions that sowed the seed of its own downfall and the eventual stripping away of many of its achievements."
Jordy Cummings
Forces of Chaos and Anarchy: Popular Music, the New Left and Social Movements, 1966-‐1972
"An iconic 1971 poster shows the faces of leading Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.. The poster is an advertisement for an “Intercommunal Day of Solidarity” as well as a birthday celebration for Newton. The music was to be provided by the Grateful Dead. With some notable exceptions, the lyrical content and interviews done with well-‐known American and British rock and soul musicians seem to take for granted that revolution was around the corner, unsurprising given that in 1969, over one million American students also self-‐identified as revolutionaries.
This paper aims to gain an understanding of the affective contagion that shaped a culture in which revolutionary politics was inseparable from its musical soundtrack. While much has been written about the connection between punk culture and radical politics, there has been little by the way of analysis of the similar role played by popular music for the New Left. It wasn’t merely that young radicals listened to popular music, but of the dialectical reciprocity between the popular music of the late sixties and early seventies and the social movements. There was a shared community of belief between cultural producers and
young radicals that went beyond simple lyrical content – this was not “protest music”, instead it was forming a new subjectivity. To emphasize, this was mass culture at the same time it was implicitly counter-‐hegemonic. Critical engagement in the underground press had Marxist writers, notably Robert Christgau, taking popular music as seriously as critics continue to treat literature, film and social theory.
Drawing on an engagement with Frederic Jameson, Raymond Williams and Jacques Ranciere, this paper aims at formulating precisely how organic attempts to develop counter-‐hegemony through cultural production occurred in a historically specific sense. Implicit in this is how a similar counter-‐hegemony can be developed in the 21st century."
Eduardo da Motta a Albuquerque, João Antonio de Paula, Hugo Eduardo da Gama Cerqueira, Leonardo Gomes de Deus Carlos & Eduardo Suprinyak
“If we have not touched the bottom, how far are we from it?”: Marx’s unpublished manuscripts on the 1866 crisis
"Marx's unpublished notebooks on the 1866 crisis (the Exzerpthefte B108, B109, and B113) are little known. In this paper, we argue that they are a useful source of information about his investigations on the crisis in general and its role in the capitalist dynamics. We also suggest that the part V of the third volume of Capital provides guidelines for reading and understanding Marx’s notes and excerpts in the notebooks.
According to Engels, part V placed the greatest difficulties in the work of editing the third volume: not only it “dealt with the most complicated subject” but there was a “long section in the manuscript, entitled ‘The Confusion’, containing nothing but extracts from parliamentary reports on the crises of 1848 and 1857”. This description hints at the potential role of the above-‐mentioned notebooks for the development of Marx’s argument in Capital: they may be seen as parts of Marx's studies in view of the revision of the manuscript of the third volume.
To explore this conjecture we make a close reading of the part V of the third volume of Capital and its preparatory manuscripts (MEGA II.4.2 and MEGA II.14), comparing them to the contents of those three notebooks."
Juan Dal Maso
Gramsci, Trotsky and the struggle for proletarian hegemony
"Debates about struggle against capitalism are many times determined by an opposition between theory of hegemony and theory of permanent revolution. But this opposition is more the result of a theoretical operation than the product of a true contradiction.
In this paper, we will try to deploy some aspects about the marxism’s development of the idea of proletarian hegemony in a relation to the comprehension of the proletarian
revolution in 20 Century. This way, we will underline convergences and differences between Gramsci’s and Trotsky’s theories.
We will analize Peter D. Thomas point of view about central role of theory of hegemony in Prison Notebooks, making an assessment about positions of The Gramscian Moment and those of the so-‐called “argentinian gramscian” intellectuals, like José María Aricó and Juan Carlos Portantiero, whose influence were “hegemonic” in gramscian studies in Latinamerica many decades; and last but not least, we will make a comparison between Gramsci and Trotski’s points of view and their importance to a strategic reflection today."
Gareth Dale
Polanyi, or colonialism/growth
A paper that tracks the origins of the ideology of economic growth (alongside that of ‘the economy’ per se), to the contradictions of the C17 English mercantilists—including, and here I address HM’s CfP, their colonial agenda. To say that English mercantilism came into being to promote the interests of the East India and Royal African companies would be to exaggerate… but not by much. And as is well known, the mercantilists sought to give their special pleading on behalf of corporate interests the appearance of unimpeachable veracity by expressing it in a scientific idiom. (This was, after all, the age of Bacon, Newton, etc.) To drastically simplify the argument: the idea of the self-‐regulating market emerged as economists and political theorists of this era revised natural law doctrine. Here, Locke, North, and Barbon, and perhaps Child, are the crucial figures. ‘The economy’ came to be conceived as a mechanism; indeed, as the cosmos appears to a deist. Economy and cosmos are alike divine machines; they both run like clockwork according to natural laws. Both require a benevolent fine-‐tuner-‐ruler (God; government / the ruling class). God’s role as divine watchmaker can pretty straightforwardly be deduced, by superstition posing as reason. But how to justify the analogously divine position of the state / ruling class vis-‐à-‐vis the economy? Here, the colonial experience was crucial—as I argue in the rest of the paper.
Katja Daniels
Protecting Capitalism from Political Protest? The 'Full Protection and Security' Standard in International Investment Treaties
International investment treaties require national states to protect foreign companies who have invested within their territory from expropriation, unfair and inequitable treatment, and discrimination – each of which has been interpreted in innovative ways by the corporate-‐friendly international investment tribunals that rule on such cases. In so far as investment treaties place limits on how governments can respond to domestic political pressures, each of the above treaty standards is implicated in class struggle – a civil society
victory at the national level can be challenged by affected corporations at the international level (e.g. Quebec’s moratorium on fracking is currently being challenged as a breach of a corporation’s ‘legitimate expectations’ to extract shale gas and thereby the fair and equitable treatment standard, while Australia’s and Uruguay’s tobacco plain packaging regulations are being challenged as indirect expropriations of a tobacco company’s intellectual property). However, there is one particular treaty standard that has recently attracted the attention of companies, and that has the potential to more directly interfere with the political activities of anti-‐capitalist movements. Corporations have recently brought a number of multi-‐million dollar legal cases against states for their alleged failures to afford corporations ‘full protection and security’ from adverse social demonstrations and direct action protests that have targeted their operations. As such, they have invoked the ‘full protection and security’ standard to protect themselves not from government action motivated by domestic political pressures (as do the other treaty standards), but directly from the civil society protestors themselves. It is still uncertain what precisely this legal standard demands of states, but this paper suggests that the political implications of this clause may well precede any legal consequences – the threat of such lawsuits may themselves incentivise states to strike down on protests.
Brecht De Smet
Gramsci, Caesarism, and (Counter-‐)Revolution in Egypt
"This paper explores the Gramscian concept of Caesarism (quantitative and qualitative, progressive and reactionary) and its relevance for understanding the current process of revolution and restoration in Egypt.
First, attention is paid to conceptual relations between Caesarism and, on the one hand, traditional Marxist notions such as Bonapartism and populism, and, on the other, Gramscian concepts such as passive revolution, hegemony, and historical bloc. Similarities, differences, and problems of interpretation are accentuated.
Subsequently, the contemporary political process, especially the role of the military and the position of (former) Field Marshal al-‐Sissi, is framed within Egypt's historical trajectory, refracturing the Nasserist episode and the transformations that followed it through the prism of Gramsci's concepts of Caesarism and passive revolution.
Finally, the discussion returns to Gramsci, concluding that the concept of Caesarism operates in two interconnected domains.
(1) In the field of class politics, strategy, and hegemony it refers to a botched process of popular subject constitution -‐ a degenerated Modern Prince. In this tradition, Caesarism is linked to such concepts as ""substitutionism"" (Trotsky) and ""octroyal socialism"" (Draper).
(2)As a political-‐economic category it deals with a specific mode of state formation and/or reconfiguration of a historical bloc. Here the concept is closer to Cox's classical interpretation of Caesarism as the ""instrumentality of passive revolution"", although it is argued that it cannot be fully subsumed by the latter notion."
Lívia de Cássia Godoi Moraes Financialization as a response to crisis: the case of EMBRAER S.A.
This article summarizes the results of my thesis about the increase of the financialization of the biggest aeronautic enterprise in Brazil: Embraer S.A. Embraer was created in a context of military dictatorship, as part of the international division of labor and the condition of Brazilian dependence, in the context of the structural crisis of capital in the 1970s. Over four decades of existence, it has sought responses to the crisis for not being crashed. The company was privatized in 1994 under the implementation of neoliberal policies. Since then, many changes have been implemented, characterized by the globalization of capital with the prevalence of the fictitious capital accumulation. According to our studies, fictitious capital and productive capital are deeply related. The research also demonstrated that the more the capital is sprayed, the more it intensifies the use of the workforce's labor through organizational change, outsourcing and imposing standards of corporate governance, reorganization of the company's layout, changes in the types of hiring, internalization of toyotists standards behavioral, etc. Moreover, we intended to point out the contradictions of these movements that directly impact the company workers, always having as perspective of analyses the relationship between the particularity of EMBRAER and the social totality.
Simona De Simoni & Ilaria Bertazzi
The survival of capitalism and the problem of social reproduction
"The problem of social reproduction is a open question in Marx's thought and it is directly connected to the issue of the survival of capitalism. It constitutes a ground for updating the Marxist-‐Feminist legacy and making it politically active. Taking the perspective of Federici's thought as the starting point for our discussion, we can assume that in the transition towards global neoliberalism the temporal sequence between reproduction and accumulation has collapsed. The social conflict is transformed by the emergence of a capitalism that not only reproduces itself, but a kind of capitalism that, in the meantime of its reproduction also extracts value for itself without any mediation.
Starting from this assumption, combining our fields of expertise -‐ economics and philosophy, we intend to analyze the capitalistic appraisal of social reproduction with particular attention to the processes of financialization. We consider the mechanism of debt as a means of analyzing welfare, work and local politics as a part of a general process of
capitalistic restructuring within social reproduction, where this constitutes ground for a “new original accumulation” that produces impoverishment and exploitation. At the same time we assume the ambiguity of reproductive relationships and activities in order to develop antagonistic practices."
Jodi Dean
The Party
Critiques of the party in terms of agreement or schism remain at the level of the imaginary; the party is nothing but a figure of egoism and competition. But the symbolic dimension of the party, its form as a place from which communists assess themselves and their actions, is what matters. This paper looks at communist lives for evidence of the symbolic effect of the communist party. In what ways did the party make itself felt as a place from which communists looked at themselves and their settings? Instead of focusing on classic texts, figures, and events, I consider instead narratives from everyday experiences of rank and file members in the CPUSA and CPGB. I look to examples from these parties because of their weakness. The US and UK are neither party states nor parliamentary systems where communists have ever had much electoral success. Even in the 1930s and 1940s when the communist party was at its strongest in the US and UK, actual political power was out of reach. In the twentieth century, neither country has appeared on the brink of revolution, but instead has encountered a mix of de-‐radicalizing middle class prosperity, working class defeat, and capitalist aggression, not to mention the intense anti-‐communism of the Cold War. How, then, under conditions even Moscow agreed were far from revolutionarily ripe, did a communist sensibility endure? What enabled the communist party to provide a location from which members in the US and UK could see their actions as valuable and worthwhile and that even non-‐members could and would adopt? My claim is that the affective infrastructure of the party provided the material support for its symbolic location. So instead of considering the communist party in terms of ideology, program, leadership, or organizational structure, I am approaching it in terms of its affective capacities, the dynamics of feeling it generated and mobilized.
William Dixon
Development, Consolidation and the Commodity
This paper sets out an understanding of how capitalism survived by examining the changing conditions of the system within the context of Britain. The limit of such an approach is that it examines a global system within a non-‐global confine. Nevertheless it is a confine of some importance to the development and survival of capitalism. If the global system were to prosper it had, arguably, to survive in the UK. In addition in examining how it survived we must do so in terms of characteristics that define the nature of a capitalist system. The paper examines the emergence of a bourgeois society in terms of the characteristics of the
commodity and so how struggle and consolidation must both be shaped within that space, leading to new forms of struggle and consolidation. These issues are investigated through the works of leading theorists and reformers to show a coherent line of development that, it is argued, prefigure developments within globalisation.
Caglar Dolek & Deniz Parlak
Class Response to Crisis of Neoliberalism in Peripheral Setting: On the Radicalization of Labour Struggles in Turkey
The current global crisis and accompanying social uprisings in different national settings have saliently demonstrated the fragile and contested character of neoliberalism as a world-‐historical project of restoration of class power of capital. As a so-‐called one of the “success stories” of neoliberalism at least for the last decade, Turkey provides a significant and interesting case to make critical sense of the character of current crisis as well as dynamics of social resistance. While the hegemonic bloc, politically represented by AKP, has been experiencing deep-‐rooted crisis, the social and political opposition has been gradually radicalized as most vividly experienced during the Gezi Park uprisings. Despite its radical content and massive scale, transformative potential of Gezi resistance has seemed to be absorbed by the systematic and relentless oppression of police power, which has become the sole means of bourgeois politics in contemporary Turkey. Though there is much debate on the class character of the Gezi uprisings, Turkey has also been experiencing numerous waves of labour resistances as experienced in the struggles of Kazova, Greif, Feniş, Zentiva, Şişecam, Yatağan, etc. workers in the last few years. Organized spontaneously to a large extent, such resistances raise radical demands against precarious forms of labouring and living, and resort to strategies destructive of capital’s domination in workplaces, which in turn substantially denounce the already narrowed frontiers of bourgeois law. A qualitative change has seemed to be underway in the labour movement with the gradual proliferation of radical strategies like workplace occupation, general strike, destruction of means of production, direct confrontation with state power, etc. In this paper, we aim to discuss the radical potential of the currently rising labour resistances as a labour response to the organic crisis of neoliberal hegemony in Turkey.
Kevin Doogan
Zero Hours Contracts: Underestimated or Overstated?
In the last eighteen months Zero Hours Contracts have become the subject of debate and controversy in the mainstream of policy, in trades union circles and professional bodies. Different data sets, based on employers’ and employees’ surveys offer contrasting perspectives on the extent and rise of contracts that do not guarantee minimum hours. Currently the consensus would suggest that, even if underestimated, about 1% of the workforce is employed on these contracts. This would appear disproportionate to the level
of concern. This paper looks at the basis for these differences and considers the broader question as to whether they represent a radical shift in the balance of bargaining power, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession. It examines whether they indicate an escalation of the pursuit of labour market flexibility, but also questions whether the wider process of flexibilisation would be assisted by the broader adoption of Zero Hours Contracts. By focusing on Zero Hours Contracts this paper will contribute to the wider discussion of precarity.
Susana Draper
The state and the common -‐-‐ re thinking the scope of political change in the Latin American present
In the past decades, there has been a constant tension between the language of "social (political) movements" and the language of the State. However, some of the questions that this conflict arises relate to the main points of discussion among heterodox Marxists in the 1970s, a moment in which the language of change was starting to problematize the relationship between "revolution" and the takeover of the State. This paper proposes a dialogue between those issues as they were posed in the past and present taking Bolivia as a problematic nucleus from where to envisage the way in which the State and the common pose a new political language to approach the notion of "social change".
Richard Drayton
'Ultraimperialism' and the White International: Transnational Racial Formations in the global capitalist regime, c. 1850 to the present.
"In September 1914, Kautsky published his famous essay on 'Ultraimperialism'. He speculated, along lines already opened up by Hobson, about a future age in which the European imperial powers would operate as a pacific combine rather than making war on each other.
In reality, as I have argued elsewhere, such trans-‐European imperial collaboration had been a fundamental part of European expansion since the sixteenth century, even if imperial historiography, grounded in the national paradigm, has usually focussed exclusively on imperial competition. But there is a qualitative change which happens c. 1850 in terms of the consolidation of a de facto Pan-‐European 'white international', organised around ideas of civilisation, modernity, and the international system. The paper will explore how the transnational construction of racial identities and status differences went along with a racialised international division of labour, the restriction of migration flows and citizenship, and the consolidation of structures and mechanisms of European and United States imperial collaboration.
The 1914-‐45 period represents a fundamental period of crisis in this regime of global domination on the one hand, and of white collective privilege on the other. The Russian and Chinese revolutions, and the age of decolonisation appeared to break apart that European-‐centred world order. But even as the formal European empires disintegrated, that nucleus of 'white' solidarity, remained at the heart of the West's Cold War coalition, informing the politics of anti-‐communism and economic and security cooperation. Strikingly also since 1989, there has been a self-‐conscious attempt to consolidate the 'white international' around United States hegemony, with ideas such as the 'anglosphere', and the association of anglo-‐american political and economic norms with the gold standard for human rights and economic freedom, underlying the neo-‐liberal global order. To this extent, the West's coalition wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya need to be understand in terms of the internal dynamics of this ultra-‐imperial combine.
The ascent of the 'white international' had a material foundation: the gap in economic and military power between the West and the rest which opened up with industrialization. Its more recent reconfigurations take place in the context of the relative industrial decline of the ultra-‐imperial core. Since the 1970s, the solution found by the United States to this lay in financialisation, and its command, in the midst of 'liberalized' economies, of the goods, services and savings. Such command has always been premised by strategic hegemony, and the militarism of our own age is linked to this attempt to translate military and intelligence power into economic dominance. The transnational racial formations ordered by eighteenth-‐ and nineteenth-‐century European imperialism continue thus in hidden ways to shape the organisation of twenty-‐first century capitalism, even in the midst of the ascent of China. Pace Kautsky, the ultra-‐imperial path leads also to perpetual war."
Devi Dumbadze
Commodity and unregimented experience
"The commodity is an intricate, “sensuous-‐supersensuous thing.” For exchange value to be real, it requires a body, which a thing, as use value, becomes, bringing that exchange value to appearance. So use value turns, according to Marx, into the so-‐called “carrier” of its exact opposite, value. This unity of opposites, which Marx even terms an “insane form,” is as an economic relation at the same time an epistemological form. The commodity has a particular thought form as its underside, one in which the subjective determination, the concept, is imposed upon nonidentical things in order to constitute them as identical objects, whose identity can be expressed in a set of distinct attributes. The conditions of the possibility of experience are, in the materialist critique of epistemology, themselves results of shifts within “natural history,” according to Adorno. This history of the regimentation of mimesis, which proceeds from the biological to the magical “stage” and, finally, to the historical in labor, has its counterpoint in the “unregimented experience,” whose reflected form is art and aesthetic experience. Though art is itself part of commodification and the
disenchantment of the world, it is nevertheless the foretoken of what a redeemed life -‐ one without the constraint of labor – would be."
Cédric Durand
The violence of ficticious capital
This contribution examines the role of fictitious capital in the contemporary financialisation and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. A first section proposes a brief genealogy of this concept and explicits the subtle intermediary position of Marx on this issue, between Austrian eocnomists, on the one hand, and keynesian and (neo)chartists, on the other hand. A second section presents some stylized facts accounting for the rise of this category since the seventies for the the main high income economies. The elementary forms of fictitious capital (credit to the private sector, public debt and market capitalization) are distinguished from the sophisticated forms which have surged in the recent period (derivatives and shadow banking). A third section specifies the relevance of this category in the conendrum of financial profits, i.e. its relation to capital gains, levy of domestic non-‐financial profits, capture of the gains of unequal exchange and profits from alienation. The fourth section tries to assess its impact on the survival of capitalism and points to the related mechanisms of socioeconomic violence by the state in the direct form of dispossessive auteritarian policies and indirect forms of orthodox and unorthodox central banks 'Lender of last resort' policies.
Hester Eisenstein
Holding up half the sky? Hegemonic feminism in the service of neoliberalism.
"In my book Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Paradigm, 2009) I argued that a particular form of liberal feminism, which I named “hegemonic,” had become entrapped in the transition to neoliberalism.
A select composite of some of the ideas of the international women’s movement has been packaged and branded as the logical counterpart to the ideology of capitalist neoliberalism, encompassing ideas of individual success, competitiveness, personal responsibility, and above all access to economic and political power for a select few.
Acolytes of hegemonic feminism include New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof and his Chinese wife Sheryl WuDunn, authors of Half the Sky, former president Jimmy Carter, in his 2014 book, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power; and corporate leaders such as Sheryl Sandberg in her popular volume Lean In. In this kind of analysis, success for women in the First World is linked to individual aggression, while aid to individual women is now widely embraced as the key to ending poverty, and to launching Third World low income states on the road to prosperity.
It is crucial for Marxist Feminists to unmask the uses of this form of feminism, and to restore the role of feminist ideology to its rightful place as a partner and friendly critic of Marxist analysis and practice."
Maria Elisa Cevasco
Brazil in times of riot
Which forms does political commitment take in the rarefied atmosphere of postmodernity? Fredric Jameson has been mapping the contours of the conditions of possibility for a truly anti-‐capitalist politics in book after book, at least since his definitive characterization of the logic of late capitalism in his justly celebrated essay of 1984 “Postmodernism – the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. In a recent interview (2011) published in the Minnesota Review (78, 2013) he uncannily talked about Brazil as a possible site for the emergence of a new type of politics: “It is very important to be able to imagine a space that is somewhere outside, and a country like Brazil gives a chance to imagine a space where things can be imagined that are not even conceivable inside this system” (p.93). In June 2013 the inconceivable happened and in less than a month a million protesters had come out in all of the big cities of the country to protest against the current situation. What had happened to the success story of a peculiar Brazilian green path in the scorched land of neo-‐liberal globalization? What kind of social symptom was being expressed? What do the June Days, as they came to be called on the Left, tell us about forms of politics in our time? My paper tries to address those questions and to examine in which sense they can be thought as the painful construction of this new political space.
Martin Empson
Sustainable Agriculture: Are small-‐farms the answer in a post-‐capitalist world?
"One key, but neglected, source of environmental pollution is agriculture. 14% of emissions come from agricultural production and a further 17% of emissions are from changing land use and forestry (IPCC, 2007). Modern agriculture is dominated in the developed world by big-‐business, which relies on heavy use of chemicals, intensive mono-‐cropped farming and over-‐reliance of technology -‐ the “art of turning oil into food” (Foster, 2010) and is closely linked to the imposition of neo-‐liberal policies on the developing world, encouraging agriculture for the market, not for the hungry.
Left wing literature on the potential for “rational” or “sustainable” agriculture frequently draws on the experience of radical-‐agrarian movements in the developing world. All too often this literature concentrates on the benefits of “small farms” versus agri-‐business (eg Magdoff & Tokar, 2010; Bello , 2009; Klingzell-‐Brulin & Brulin, 2010); in this they reflect more liberal views such as those (eg Tudge, 2011) who argue for small-‐scale farming under a reformed capitalism. Small-‐scale farming under capitalism can offer benefits over multinational driven agriculture such as improved yields, better resilience to environmental
changes and natural disasters and reduced reliance on pesticides and chemicals). Yet small-‐scale agriculture is limited by a range of problems associated with peasant production – particularly the limited use of technology and the highly labour-‐intensive work -‐ and is associated with patterns of seasonal labour amongst a wider agrarian work force (Bernstein, 2010). Equally there are powerful reasons why we should be critical of large-‐scale capitalist agriculture (Magdoff & Tokar, 2010; Bello, 2009; Empson 2014).
This question of agriculture in a post-‐capitalist society was debated in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, as well as by earlier writers in the Marxist tradition (eg Kautsky, 1899), and it remains relevant today. However within the Communist tradition, from the late 1920s, “socialist agriculture” was often viewed as synonymous with industrialised collective farming, ignoring real advantages associated with peasants working their own land.
In this paper I argue that Marxism allows a critique of agriculture under capitalism and a vision of the transition to a genuine socialist agriculture avoiding either a crude position of supporting collective industrial farming or a romantic view of small-‐scale production as a solution to environmental crisis and food production.
I will outline an alternative that suggests that gains by agrarian movements could lead to a radically different vision of agriculture based on the experience of a rural peasantry in a wider socialist economy. But in the first instance this means peasants and rural workers seizing land and farms and redistributing land, and likely, though not inevitably, giving private farms a new lease of life. In the longer term it will mean a gradual transition towards collective agriculture. “Socialist prosperity... in the very long run [will] persuade the peasantry to give up their individual farms.” (Cliff, 1964)
Only this can offer the potential to feed seven billion people in a sustainable way."
Sai Englert
The changing class nature of Israeli Society
"The last 15 years have seen increasingly right-‐wing governments elected in Israel, with growing representation for the ultra-‐nationalist, religious and settler far-‐right. This has led commentators to emphasise the importance of the growth of Israel’s religious population, while lamenting the liberal or labour Zionist governments of the past.
However, less attention has been paid to the more fundamental transformations in the class nature of Israeli society, which this paper will argue are crucial to understanding the political changes in the Israeli state.
The paper will discuss class formation in the Yishuv and Israel in three periods: firstly, the development of a powerful workers’ movement and a weak local bourgeoisie (pre-‐1948); secondly, the period of economic development led by the Israeli state and labour
bureaucracy (1948-‐1984); and thirdly, the neoliberal period in which the Israeli bourgeoisie, supported by US imperialism, rose to political dominance (post 1984).
The paper will focus on changing class relationships within Zionism, as well as the shifting relationship between Israel and Western imperialism. It will also highlight the continuities in the overarching political project of expansion and ethnic cleansing throughout the periods discussed."
Ertan Erol
Re-‐scaling the peripheral capitalist spatiality and resistance: Autogestional momentum within the counter-‐hegemonic socio-‐spatial movements in Mexico
"It is possible to argue that the three decades of neoliberal re-‐territorialisation in Mexico led to the intensification of the neoliberal social relations on different social scales. It is possible to identify these processes of re-‐configuration under three areas; ‘privatisation and marketisation of social services, valorisation and utilisation of the local resources, and internationalising and elasticising the labour relations’. However, these processes are dialectical socio-‐spatial processes, and thus, needs to be perceived as dynamic and contested processes rather than a deterministic consolidation of the capitalist space in the form of neoliberal capitalist accumulation. The counter-‐hegemonic social movements in Mexico is conditioned by these processes of re-‐structuring whether articulated through and utilised the urban space like #YoSoy132 or unfolded on the local scales such as the indigenous movements and Autodefensas.
This paper aims to locate the recent counter hegemonic social movements in Mexico within the broader processes of neoliberal restructuring of the peripheral capitalist social relations and spatiality, and thus, attempts to analyse the nature and autogestional potentials and limits of these movements. It is argued in this paper that the neoliberal hegemonic consensus in Mexico is facing a socio-‐spatial crisis which paved way to the proliferation of series of social struggles with or without the potentials of real transformation or alternatives. These socio-‐spatial struggles have been structured by the same structural dynamics that underpinning the peripheral socio-‐spatial forms and practices of exploitation, and their constant reproduction and reconfiguration on different social scales. Therefore, it can be argued that these peripheral socio-‐spatial forms will be the sites and stakes of the counter-‐hegemonic struggles where the autogestional strategies could/would occupy the cracks in the neoliberal hegemonic order and widen them."
Asefeh Esfahlani
State and Crisis of Overproduction: the Case of Film Industry in 1970s Iran
In order to investigate how capitalism survives, it would be helpful to consider the ways through which capitalism is rescued from a serious crisis. This paper will concentrate on the role of the state to rescue the capitalist mode of production from the crisis of over-‐production. It examines the industry of cinema in the 1970s in Iran when the uncontrollable drive for more profit by the private sector lead the industry into the crisis of over-‐producing films. In order to argue this process, firstly, I will explain the political economy of cinema in this period. Secondly, I will discuss the intervention of state in the crisis in order to diversify the film texts and find new markets for them. This was an opportunity which the independent and radical filmmakers attempted to take up to produce critical and avant-‐guard film. Accordingly, it lead to the production of films known as Iranian New Wave cinema. Thirdly, I will explore the reasons why the state intervention was not successful to survive the industry as the domestic production collapsed by the end of 1970s. Teppo Eskelinen
Possibilities and limits of green Keynesianism
The paper on "Possibilities and limits of green Keynesianism" discusses to what extent issues of equality and sustainability can be addressed by economic policy measures based on public investment and fiscal stimulus. It seems possible to design a social investment programme directed at achieving both full employment and a more environmentally sustainable social order. Yet there are two lines of serious counter-‐arguments against this scenario. First, one can question whether a sustainability strategy implying consumption growth is doomed to fail; second, it needs to be noted that the strategy is based on naturalizing employment relations rather than treating them as power structures, which leaves major social inequalities intact. From this basis, the chapter discusses, to what extent hopes should be given for a "green Keynesian" strategy.
Danny Evans
Class against class in the Spanish Second Republic
"The threat of the Right produced an insurrectionary response from a sector of Spanish anarchism in the years 1932-‐1933. The practice of this sector, which at the time dominated the anarcho-‐syndicalist trade union, the CNT, has been compared to that adopted by the German Communist Party during the so-‐called ‘Third Period’. It has been characterised as sectarian and self-‐destructive, and derided by some contemporary anarchists as ‘anarcho-‐Bolshevik’. Its moment of culmination occurred in December 1933, in the wake of general elections won by the Right and in an atmosphere of pessimism, combined with messianic rhetoric, in anarchist circles.
The tactics of insurrection appalled certain elements of the CNT, including gradualist syndicalists and the dissident communists of the BOC, whose criticisms will be addressed by
this paper. But, how far can the comparison with Third Period Communism be taken, and to what extent does it rely on the assumed virtues and effectiveness of a broad anti-‐fascist front? Here, I intend to explore these questions and to look again at anarchist voluntarism in 1930s Spain in the context of anti-‐fascism as it was then conceived."
Jessica Evans
Understanding ‘white nationalism’ and racialized class formation in the settler-‐colonies: A theoretical proposal
This paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between race and class in a historically specific set of social formations – the settler colonies. Drawing upon elements of Political Marxism and Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) I make the following argument. First, in the settler colonies nationalism was a basic, existential precondition of the state. Following this, I argue that nationalism must be understood in the context of the specific social property relations of the capitalist mode of production which makes possible horizontal forms of solidarity. And yet, for these property relations to emerge in the settler states, a grammar of racial exclusion applied to the indigenous populations was required. Thus, despite the surface appearance of formal, horizontal equality that nationalism suggests, in the settler colonies this required the generation of a racially exclusive grammar that manifested in the phenomenon of so-‐called ‘white nationalism’. As a result, class was understood in explicitly racial terms. Importantly, this meant that labour was self-‐consciously ‘white labour’. Despite these origins, however, the settler states were also subject to international processes of uneven and combined development which would result in myriad strategies of ‘catch-‐up’, among which were resort to varying forms of politically coerced labour processes through the importation of racialised immigrant labour. Far from simply a functionalist strategy of capital, however, the racialized stratification of the labour market which would result emerged from complex interactions between the formation of settler classes, the geopolitical pressure to which settler capitalists were subject and the mix of strategies they pursued in order to compete with established metropoles, as well as the self-‐interest of 'white labour'.
Andrew Feenberg
The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School
"This paper presents the newly published book The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School (Verso 2014). The paper explains the philosophy of praxis of four Marxist thinkers, the early Marx and Lukács, and the Frankfurt School philosophers Adorno and Marcuse. The philosophy of praxis holds that fundamental philosophical problems are in reality social problems abstractly conceived. This argument has two implications: on the one hand, philosophical problems are significant insofar as they reflect real social
contradictions; on the other hand, philosophy cannot resolve the problems it identifies because only social revolution can eliminate their social causes.
I call this a “metacritical” argument. I argue that metacritique in this sense underlies the philosophy of praxis and can still inform our thinking about social and philosophical transformation. The various projections of such transformations distinguish the four philosophers discussed in this paper. They also differ on the path to social change. They develop the metacritical argument under the specific historical conditions in which they find themselves. Differences in these conditions explain much of the difference between them, especially since philosophy of praxis depends on a historical circumstance—the more or less plausible revolutionary resolution of the problems at the time they are writing."
Ruth Felder
From the pink tide to new developmentalism: recreating the conditions for capital accumulation in South America
"In the 2000s, the coming to power of left and centre left governments in South America and the accompanying challenges to the basic tenets of the neoliberal orthodoxy raised widespread attention. Many analyses have focused on the nature of the new political leaders in the region, their relation to social movements, the challenges to the US and the anti-‐imperalist nature of this left turn. As these experiences have been ridden with conflict and contradictions, some critics have stressed the lack of political will of most governments to deliver on hopes while others have pointed at the external intrusion in domestic politics in the most radical experiments and the US's attempts to regain control over the region. Less attention has been paid to the nature of the historical development pattern that followed the crisis of neoliberalism in the region. The study of the this development pattern is central to understand the scope and limitations to the recent South American post-‐neoliberal experiments and interpret its contradictions, conflicts and prospects.
Building on debates on the nature of the South American new-‐developmentalism and post-‐liberal regionalism, the role of the states in them and the international insertion of the countries of the region as commodity exporters, this paper will argue that the very active economic intervention of the states of the region and the recent forms of regional cooperation going beyond free trade and liberalization have been part of a process of internationalization of the region's economies and states and have involved the recreation of the conditions for capital accumulation after the debacle of neoliberal reforms. The paper will pay special attention to the building of regional arrangements and other mechanisms of regional cooperation associated to it (namely, MERCOSUR, UNASUR, IIRSA and CELAC) and will locate them in the context of the balances of forces and patterns of capital accumulation that underlie them."
Mariano Féliz
Neodevelopmentalism, accumulation by dispossession and international rent. Argentina, 2003-‐2013.
"After the crisis of the neoliberal project in Argentina, dominant classes were able to recreate their social hegemony under the umbrella of a new development project, which has been labeled neodevelopmentalist (Féliz, 2012). In line with the historical developmentalist project of dominant fractions of capital in Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s, a new articulation of productive forces, State-‐form and constitution of the class conflict, led by a new hegemonic block dominated by the transnationalized fractions of capital, dialectically displaced neoliberal adjustment momentum in Argentina. Having successfully performed the restructuring of capital as a whole (constant and variable, fixed and circulating, productive and financial, rentier and non-‐rentier, etc.), a new developmentalist consensus (DC) has set the pace for capitalist development in the country (Féliz, 2012b).
This new DC is based on a significantly different role for the articulation between manufacturing industry and primary (export-‐led) productions. Much in line with Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis, neodevelopmentalist savoir-‐fair tries to create the conditions for sustained capital accumulation while accepting –as a question of historical inevitability and, even, good luck-‐ the place of Argentina as producer-‐exporter of primary commodities and basic manufactures of those commodities. In such context, a permanent and systematic process of ‘primitive accumulation’, or accumulation by dispossession to follow Harvey’s terminology, becomes tantamount to the production and expanded reproduction of capital in Argentina’s value-‐space. Transformation of common goods and natural riches into private ‘natural resources’ (ie., capital) comes to constitute the basis for a capitalist development strategy that fuels economic growth on production, appropriation and redistribution of ground-‐rent.
In this article we discuss these processes in the light of Rosa Luxemburg’s approach, showing how ground-‐rent articulates with primitive accumulation to perpetuate accelerated valorization and accumulation of capital in Argentina after 2003. First, we discuss some relevant theoretical concepts. After that, we show how Rosa’s approach can be useful and enlighten the analysis of the current process of capital accumulation in Argentina. Finally, we present some brief conclusions and the bibliographical references."
Romain Felli
Resilience to climate change : neoliberalising adaptation ?
This paper discusses the possible emergence of a new norm in international environmental politics, reinforcing the existing norm of liberal environmentalism. In the context of growing scepticism towards the ability to avoid the worse effects of environmental – and climatic – change, international organisations have recently turned to a language of "adaptation". The
current goal of international environmental politics is directed less towards the avoidance or mitigation of environmental changes, than towards creating the conditions in which individuals, regions, socio-‐ecological systems, even States, could not only cope with this change, but actually reinforce the accumulation of capital. This new productive way of conceiving society-‐environmental relations is predicated on the concept of "resilience" as an politico-‐ethical norm.
Alexandre Feron
Sartre's Theory of Class
The object of my paper is to present Sartre’s theory of class in his "Critique of Dialectical Reason" and to show in what way it is a contribution to Marxist theory. Indeed when dealing with class, Marxism often hesitates between an “objectivist” and a “subjectivist” conception (class is determined by position in social productive relations or by class consciousness which is a product of class struggle). I would like to show how the concepts that Sartre develops in CDR (class as “class-‐being”, as a “collective”, as a “group”, as an “institution”, as a “praxis-‐process”), far from making him a “subjectivist”, help to articulate these two dimensions. I intend therefore to propose a systematic reconstruction of Sartre’s theory of class. More broadly, I would like to show the importance of Sartre’s attempt to set the foundations for an “anthropologie structurale et historique” and its relevance today for the elaboration of Marxist social sciences.
Robert FIne
Semblance and substance: Marx's critique of the legal forms of capitalist society
My review of Marx’s critique of the legal forms of capitalist society tests the following proposition: that the critique of law is not the same as the trashing of law and that they should rather be seen as opposites. Whilst trashing has as its end the devaluation of law, usually by demonstrating the chasm between the concept of universal legal equality and the actuality of concealed material interests, the critique of law has as its end the revaluation of law, usually by way of understanding both its downfall and the conditions of its reconstruction. My case is that Marx was equivocal in his critique of law, but is better read on the side of critique, not trashing. Indeed, exposing the limits of a form of radicalism that substitutes trashing law for critique of law, was a pivotal part of his juridical writings. Hostility to rights, law and the state are enduring elements of all radical traditions, since it expresses the sense of revulsion thinking people should feel over the gulf between the rights society espouses and the violence it is capable of practising. However, Marx both inherited and gave rise to an anti-‐totalitarian current of critical theory in which the semblance of freedom, equality and solidarity present in capitalist legal forms is far from discounted. In my presentation my main reference point will be Marx’s own texts, though I shall not have time to put forward the supporting evidence, which is already published in a
number of books and articles. What I shall argue why it remain as urgent today as it was in Marx’s day to recognise, recover and reconstruct the juridical aspects of capital-‐critique.
Elmar Flatschart
Does the commodity form really die? A Comparison of Robert Kurz’ and Michael Heinrich’s answers to questions of crisis theory.
Crisis Theory is probably one of Marxist Critique’s most contested terrains. While for a long time, disputes over the extent and quality of Capitalism’s crisis drive had the character of a niche problem, they certainly gained importance with the factuality of ‘actually existing crisis phenomena’ since 2007/8.
Old disputes do however remain. In the German debate, one argument over Crisis Theory that predates the actual crisis can be traced to the opposition of two currents that share a common background and are often mixed up: the Neue Marx Lektüre (New Marx Reading) and Wertkritik (value critique). While Neue Marx Lektüre authors, who focused an ‘academic’ and often philological close reading of Marx, tended to argue against all historical thesis advancing an internal rupture in the core of the ‘ideal average’ of Capitalism, Wertkritik propounded a rather bold and bulky corpus of theorems arguing for a terminal systemic crisis of Capital that stems from its internal contradictions.
In my presentation I want to give a basic overview of both approach’s background, their central thesis and the different answers to questions of crisis theory. In this, I want to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the two opposing currents, focussing on the work of two well-‐known proponents, Michael Heinrich on the one and Robert Kurz on the other side. This can build on existing material, as both authors directly or indirectly referred to each other in controversial discussions on the character and scope of Marx’ crisis and value-‐theory.
I will maintain that Michael Heinrich’s arguments are sound when it comes to the explanation of a certain immanent type of crisis of more or less limited economic character. It however fails in terms of ontological and epistemological desiderata when it comes to taking the step from economic analysis to critique of (political) economy and further on to critique of society. It can be shown that Heinrich’s approach harbours a hidden scientist reductionism when it comes to contextualising central categories of materialist critique, which ultimately limits the range of his crisis theory.
I will further argue that the framework proposed by Wertkritik unfolds greater theoretical potential by overcoming a strictly economist perspective, opening the field for a more integral critical theory of society that goes beyond Marx (while none the less building on him). Notwithstanding, there are copious theoretical problems to be resolved as many of the central thesis are far from being well elaborated and remain to be expanded and
empirically tested. Problems and open questions will be presented by drawing on Kurz’ latest book ‘Geld ohne Wert’ (Money without value)."
Chris Ford
Reconsidering the Ukrainian Revolution 1917–1921: The Dialectics of National Liberation and Social Emancipation "The Bolsheviks and the National Question Reconsidered
When considering the fate of the revolutionary wave in Europe during 1916-‐1921 the traditional view has been that the failure of European communism to carry the revolution beyond its point of origin thus isolated and decided the fate of the infant Soviet Union negatively. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the Ukrainian question was pivotal to fate of the revolutionary wave in Europe revolution. It examines the role of the Ukrainian Social-‐Democrats and Communists; in their quest for an independent Soviet Ukraine. Their alliance with Soviet Hungary, and challenges accepted views of the views of the Russian Communist Party on the national question."
Bridget Fowler
Re-‐evaluating Lucien Goldmann, sociologist of literature and Marxist theorist.
This paper will explore in depth the genetic structuralism of the Rumanian-‐French thinker, Goldmann (1913-‐1970), a theorist in danger of being dropped from the collective memory . It addresses three main areas of his thought -‐ first, his conception of a tragic vision in the work of Kant, Pascal and Racine, secondly, his abandonment of the base-‐superstructure metaphor and its replacement by a theory of structural homologies, and, thirdly, his considerations of late capitalism, with particular reference to the Post World War II Keynesian social settlement. Three books especially, Immanuel Kant (1971[1945], The Hidden God (1964 [1956] and Racine [1956], are argued to offer an illuminating and enduring understanding of cultural production in the 17th and 18th Centuries. It is also contended that studies of absolutism (eg Elias's The Court Society, Bourdieu's Sur L'Etat ) have reinforced the insightful analyses made by Goldmann (1964), further strengthening his interpretation of Pascal's realist paradoxes and Racine's drama in terms of the declining noblesse de robe. Finally, Goldmann's wider conception of the Pascalian gamble is addressed (cf MacIntyre (1971), Davidson (2014)). His own wager is on the practical feasibility of a future that combines the human rights of the Enlightenment tradition and the egalitarian solidarity of the socialist tradition. Yet, even while reaffirming this wager, Goldmann considers post-‐World War II capitalism to have become so re-‐stabilised as to have lost its inner tendencies to crisis and oppositional antagonists. This view is questioned, especially in the light of successive post-‐1970 recessions and the shift to the "spectacular" deepening of inequality (Piketty 2014).
Kristen Francis Tran
is also segmented by class, ethnicity and race, nationality and region, among other factors” (Mills, 2003: 42).
While domestic substitutes shape and reshape gender, class and racial hierarchies, the employment of the domestic substitutes has not altered women’s relation to capitalism. As I will show, what remains unchanged is the unequal distribution of caretaking activities women continues to experience within the private sphere and the expectations of women as productive workers in the public sphere.
Offered in this paper is an analysis of the ways in which relation of inequality is structured by reinforcement of and reproduction of ideologies on gender, race, and class. This is because such hierarchies also interact with ideological channels in the allocations of societal resources such as power and authority to ensure the maintaining of unequal power relations in the gender, race, and class hierarchies. International capital, as a result of this interaction, has been able to “recruit and discipline workers, to reproduce and cheapen segmented labor forces within and across national borders” (Mills, 2003; see also Enloe 1989, Ong, 1991, Safa 1995)."
Carl Freedman
Capitalist Realism and Three Recent Science-‐Fiction Films
"I take the term “capitalist realism” from Mark Fisher’s 2009 book of that title, and use it, as Fisher does, to refer to the hegemonic notion—successfully constructed during the 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic and neatly summarized in Margaret Thatcher’s aphorism, “There is no alternative”—that any realistic appraisal of current socio-‐economic reality must assume the inviolability of the capitalist mode of production in comparatively neo-‐liberal form. Capitalist realism has proved remarkably durable, even in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, which one might have thought would have discredited neo-‐liberal capitalism for good. A cultural index of its strength can be found in today’s cinematic science fiction, a genre formally devoted to the imagining of alternatives—of “new worlds and new civilizations,” in the famous STAR TREK formulation. The persistence of capitalist realism can be traced, for example, in three SF films of 2013: Alfonso Cuarón’s GRAVITY, with its ultimately mindless glorification of mere spectacle; in Spike Jonze’s HER, with its celebration of the creativity of the commodity structure, a creativity here seen as almost literally endless; and even in Steven Soderbergh’s SIDE EFFECTS—by far the most intelligent of these films—which suggests a scathing critique of neo-‐liberal capital while declining to imagine alternatives.
Diana Fuentes
Modernity and civilizational crisis. A latin american approach.
"This paper intends to present how the ecuadorian-‐mexican philospher Bolívar Echeverría has characterized our epoch as a time of crisis, not only for the consequences of the global depression or the questions of the economic model around the world, but he believes that, without denying the effects of the economic and the political crisis, this other crisis is below both, on a deeper level. It is a crisis of more far-‐reaching and irreversible consequences, as it puts into question not the effectiveness or viability of a particular political project or the growth of a nation, but the grounds on which is built the mode of reproduction of human life in all its dimensions.
It is a crisis that afflicts humanity as a whole, in a world in which the spread of the capitalist system has reconfigured in ways and to varying degrees, both the totality of social relations, as the archaic ways of relating to the natural environment . Modernity in its capitalist form, says Echeverria, by subsuming in his totalizing dynamic all the old forms of identity configuration and policy coordination has created a kind of unique story or destination unprecedented. Therefore this form of crisis resembles more a collapse of the entire civilized project in which modernity is founded."
Eirini Gaitanou
An examination of class structure in Greece, its tendencies of transformation amid the crisis, and its impacts on the organisational forms and structures of the social movement
The study of the Greek class structure is necessary for approaching and understanding the forms and structures of the labour and social movement in Greece. The class structure and the specific characteristics of the Greek social formation present special features compared to other developed capitalist countries of Europe. These features have historically resulted to the appearance of broader petty-‐bourgeois strata, in parallel to (and not competitively to) capitalist development. The tendency in the last twenty years (during the restructuring process) has been the expansion of capital into new areas and sectors of capitalist circulation, leading to the establishment of a range of services as capitalist commodities, and an expansion of unproductive, but necessary for the realisation of the surplus-‐value, activities (expanded reproduction of capitalism). Further, during the current crisis, we are witnessing a massive job destruction, along with a significant tendency of class polarisation and violent proletarianisation of the petty-‐bourgeois strata. Massive unemployment and precarious work are largely expanded, whilst the stable work model is eroded. This reality affects both the emergence and the forms of organisation of the labor and social movement. The working class is highly fragmented and heterogeneous, and the trade union movement has several weaknesses and pecularities. At the same time, large sections of the working strata cannot be expressed through the traditional trade unionism, because of conjunctural and structural reasons. Thus, there appear various forms of organisation that are beyond the scope of the traditional labor movement. The aim of this paper is to explore this landscape and the various possibilities open to collective action, its forms and manifestations at the political level.
Lucia Gallardo
Compensation for keeping fossil fuels in the soil: From within and outside Capitalism
"Ecuador was the first country to propose keeping oil in the soil in exchange for a partial compensation in order to make a transition to a post-‐extractivist economy. Keeping fossil fuels in the soil has been taken into consideration more recently in the academia as an effective measure to stop global warming, but the issue of compensation has not had a significant impact on the political debate. This paper discusses such a compensation scheme in the context of two globally accepted scarcities: the carbon sink and the non-‐capitalist development opportunities. The central argument is that compensation for non-‐extraction opens a new way to look at combating climate change and provides a non-‐market, politicized method of assessing its stakes. How does compensation transform our thinking about combating climate change? It recognizes that developing countries are engaged in an unequal international division of labor; in order to overcome their dependency, compensation might create (at least partially) the material basis for an energetic transition. Additionally, compensation does not reproduce capitalist form of exchange in terms of nature valuation; therefore, such scheme is challenging the carbon trade system by unveiling its fictitious nature. In political terms, compensation is the result of a long-‐term collective action of people who consider climate change as the result of power relations mediated by new imperialisms, including the ecological one. Finally, based on the principles of climate justice, compensation as a transnational scheme will allow an unprecedented re-‐distribution of global wealth.
Maryanne Galvão
Some reflections on primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession from an exemplary case of socioenvironmental conflict in Mato Grosso, Brazil
In recent years, in Brazil, a new outbreak of developmentism have stimulated economic growth: major works, World Cup, Olympics, etc. In the Brazilian Amazon region, this wave of development with great stimulus and government funding, have transformed the landscape and changed the lives of people who live in this region, causing many socio-‐environmental conflicts. Among several conflicts, we highlight one that occurred in Mato Grosso, midwest of Brazil, and that became the exemplary case used in our doctoral research (still in progress) among the indigenous population Enawenê-‐Nawê and a business group of builders of small hydroelectic dams along the Juruena River. In this paper, starting from the conflict mentioned, we propose a theoretical reflection about the actuallity and the continuity of primitive accumulation and what Harvey called accumulation by dispossession.
Melissa Garcia & Maria Kaika
"Mortgaged Lives": The biopolitics of debt and homeownership in Spain
"The paper aims to expand the theoretical framework within which we examine mortgage debt, by focusing on the role that mortgages play not only in financialising housing, but also in promoting a biopolitics of financialising life itself. Conceptualising mortgages as a ‘technology of power over life’ (Foucault 2003, 246), we expose the biopolitics linked to mortgaged homeownership in order to broaden the scope of analysis on the dialectics between the production of biological futures and the production of future profits.
Our analysis is grounded in a historical geographical examination of the biopolitics of mortgage debt in Spain, where, during the most recent real estate boom (1997-‐2007), mortgages were employed as a technique that was supposed to optimise income by enrolling livelihoods into the cycle of real estate speculation. But as 800,000 mortgages per year were issued as average wages fell by 10 per cent, mortgages also became a punitive/disciplinary technique, which made the population itself the object of financial speculation. Whilst livelihoods became closely connected to the rent extraction mechanisms of global finance, their very existence followed the fluctuation of financial markets with disastrous effects, including the eviction of over 200,000 Spanish families from their mortgaged homes between 2008-‐2013. The lived experience of this process will also be highlighted, based on interviews with over 30 mortgage affected people and participant observation at anti-‐eviction assemblies in the Barcelona metropolitan area since October 2013.
This way, we argue, mortgaged homeownership became central in enrolling biological life into the process of rent extraction, in two distinct ways. First, by making hundreds of thousands of livelihoods ‘mortgaged’, that is, directly dependent on the success or failure of capital accumulation strategies rooted in the built environment. Second, by producing hundreds of thousands of indebted subjects who have to be embedded continuously in the production process in order to meet their debt obligations, and who often remain indebted even after they are evicted from the home they used to own."
Christakis Georgiou
What is to be done about the EU? Situating the debate in the long-‐term tendencies behind European unification
"The last four years have seen the morphing of the economic crisis unleashed in 2007/8 into a sovereign debt crisis that initially led to wild speculation about the collapse of the eurozone only for that speculation to steadily die down as of September 2012 and the ECB's explicit signalling that such a prospect was not conceivable. The speculative dimension of the eurozone crisis is now over, and this has created conditions (collapsing sovereign bond yield spreads) that will only quicken the pace at which the real eurozone crisis – ie the competitiveness split between creditor and debtor member states – will be fixed by the European bourgeoisie(s).
The eurozone crisis has spawned a corresponding political crisis which has two dimensions. One has been the pitting of creditor member states against debtor member states. Another has been the resurgence of euroscepticism – a phenomenon that ebbs and flows with the economic fortunes of European capitalism.
The radical Left has not watched these developments from the sidelines. A debate has emerged about the Left's attitude towards the euro and the European Union more broadly. Different currents have developed diverging, if not outright conflicting, attitudes. Some argue the Left has to campaign for more fiscal federalism so that transfers can be organised from creditor to debtor states (either through official debt restructuring or a eurozone budget) while others argue for withdrawal from the eurozone and even the EU and a strategy of national economic development in the member states in which the radical Left can take power. The problem with these debates is the general voluntarism in which arguments are pitched. This is also reflected in the fact that many on the Left followed the speculators in 2010/12 in expecting a eurozone implosion. What I want to do in this contribution is situate the question of European unification in a longterm perspective. I start by telling the story of how the problem of continental unification emerged in the late nineteenth century and then gave rise to a long European civil war in the first half of the twentieth century. I then present the position adopted by the Communist International in 1923 with regards to the issue as well as Trotsky's rationale for it. The third part of the contribution deals with the “unification from above” solution that was provided to the problem in the early fifties by the French and German bourgeoisies and sketches how that process has unfolded over the past sixty or so years. I conclude with a few considerations on what this entails for the Left's attitude towards the EU as well as the prospects of the process of “unification from above” in the coming decade or so."
Roja Ghahari
Women under the Iranian Welfare System: Charity and Control "Women under the Iranian Welfare System: Charity and Control
This paper will examine the role that the Iranian welfare system (Islamic charities and income redistribution policies) has played in the making and maintenance of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Specifically, the impact of the Iranian social safety net in promoting gender roles will be assessed.
Challenging the views of the Islamic Republic as an archaic fundamentalist regime or an anti imperialist state, this paper will draw attention to how neoliberal strategies have manifested themselves, albeit in different ways, in Iran in the past 30 years. Although it is claimed that Iran has not been integrated into global capitalism, many of the same tendencies observed in other capitalist countries-‐ privatization, welfare state retrenchment, and other general features of neoliberal capitalism -‐have materialized in Iran. The dual/parallel welfare system of corporatist institutions and parastatal organizations, able to
target both the middle class and the poorer population, tries to alleviate the impacts of various neo-‐liberal policies. The closer examination of the welfare system, however, will demonstrate its gendered character and the specific ways that it reinforces gender hierarchies, pacifies dissent and maintains the regime’s ideological hegemony."
Paraskevi Gikopoulou
‘The Greek Communist Struggle and its Suppression: Prelude to Greece’s Right-‐Wing Politics, 1944-‐1946’
This paper examines the conditions under which the left-‐wing resistance in Greece was oppressed and suppressed during the liberation period and until the official civil war begun in 1946-‐1949. I seek to examine via archival documents and historical texts the relationship between the armed and political struggle of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), and how this struggle was negated by the Allied forces and the Nazi Collaborators in the post-‐war era. This exploration enables us to comprehend clearly the mechanisms under which a young European country of the time such as Greece entered a family of capitalist and liberal values at the expense of a left-‐wing popular movement that was gaining massive support. A dialogue between the British Foreign policy, Greek bourgeois politicians, Greek monarcho-‐fascists and collaborators will be discussed so as to see how right-‐wing values seized power by force after the war was over so as to keep Greece within the western sphere of influence.
Michael Goldfield
Coal Miners in the Vanguard
Large numbers of studies have shown that coal miners, throughout history, around the world, with some notable exceptions, have been among the most militant, solidaristic workers. In addition, when organized they have gravitated towards political radicalism. These tendencies also existed in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and were especially prevalent during the 1930s, as millions of industrial workers organized. Coal miners during this period engaged in dramatic strikes, inspired other workers, and came to their aid in numerous situations. In the labor upsurge in the U.S. during this period, they were the vanguard sector of the working class. Their class collaborationist leadership, however, personified by miners president John L. Lewis, partly reflected these aspirations, but also, not only savagely repressed democracy, but effectively destroyed more radical elements in the union.
Jamie Gough
The crisis in Britain since 2007: why has the resistance so far been weak, and the possibilities for a socialist response
"This paper explores the evolution of the crisis in Britain since 2007. My analysis sees neoliberalism as a logical strategy for capital to raise value creations and profitability, as
nevertheless involving severe contradictions for capital, and as consisting of class struggle. Neoliberalism therefore has deep logic but no stable forms.
British governments from 1990 to 2010 developed a ‘neoliberalism with social-‐democratic elements’. This reflected contradictions for capital thrown up by 1980s neoliberalism, in the manifest erosion of production and reproduction. Social democratic elements could be afforded because of the ‘booms’ of the mid-‐1990s and mid-‐2000s sustained by credit expansion. But the latter went into crisis in 2007-‐8. In response, British capital has embarked on a new strategy of devalorisation and raising the rate of exploitation, despite knowing the problems this may eventually lead to in productive inefficiency and political instability.
The burden of the crisis has, consequently, fallen entirely on the working class. Why, then, has resistance since 2008 so far been weak? The attacks in the private sector have been met with almost no resistance from workers and trade unions. Resistance to the cuts in the public sector have so far been limited to some trade union actions, but without successes. An explanation includes the social-‐cultural changes in the British working class effected by neoliberalism over 30 years. But it also involves the fetishistic and reifying forms of this particular crisis: the origin of the recession, and the government’s excuse for public spending cuts, in a ‘financial crisis’. Since the Labour Party accepts these fetishistic forms, it is incapable of opposing austerity.
This suggests that building successful resistance to austerity needs the working class movement to address head-‐on the value forms of the crisis. This can be done through transitional demands around employment, wages, work intensity, public services, state benefits, taxation of capital and ecology."
Kevin W. Gray
The Feminization of Labor and Capitalism’s Stability
In my paper, I use the so-‐called feminization of labor as a means to theorize the processes which stabilize the capitalist system. My basic thesis, following the French pragmatists, is that new forms of labor are explainable by capitalism’s response to emergent lifeworld protest movement. The feminization of labor, I believe, is explainable, at least in part, by the capitalist system’s exploitation of the artistic critique in its response to emergent protest movements in the 1960s. While it is true that, the first two (major) employment agencies were founded in the immediate post-‐war era:, Kelly Girl Service (1947) and Manpower, Inc, (1948) to market their jobs to women (Hatton 2011: 7), I argue that the widespread feminization of labour (at least with respect to temp work) is explainable by capitalism’s exploiting values from the lifeworld. Following Boltanski and others, I argue that the phenomenon which legitimates feminization (and precarization, to use Standing’s vocabulary) is capitalism recourse to the artistic critique of capitalism, which responder t
protests by allowing for new freedoms, new family arrangements, etc. inside the employment relationship (Boltanski 2002: 14). Capitalism’s response to demands for autonomy permitted the growth of so-‐called network firms, the decline of strict hierarchy (and the emergence of fuzzy organizations), increased mobility and the emergence of projects which gave each employee the possibility to develop his or her future employability (Chiapello & Fairclough 2002: 189). However, it also gave companies the possibility to relegate employees (originally women but increasingly men) to contingent, precarious labour.
Phil Griffiths
The class origins of the White Australia policy
"For much of the twentieth century, Australian racism revolved around the idea of a ""white"" nation, protected by a government policy that excluded non-‐white immigrants. This was a policy that was widely seen as having its origins in working class mobilisation and its purpose in protecting working class interests. This is, of course, ludicrous, but so hegemonic that no scholar (or activist) attempted to research any possible ruling class agenda behind the White Australia policy. Instead, there has been an idealist turn, as more recent historians have presented the policy as driven by racism, or more recently, by ""whiteness"", as if racism or whiteness themselves did not need to be explained and historicised.
This paper will attempt to reclaim a materialist understanding of this important example of western racism, by outlining three core bourgeois agendas that led the dominant elements in the ruling class to push through the exclusion of, first, Chinese immigrants, and later all non-‐whites. In the process, it will suggest a way of understanding the dominant ruling class strategy for the development of Australian capitalism, from the late nineteenth century until the early 1970s."
Paul Guillibert
Capitalism and the "space-‐time appropriation"
"The nature-‐society metabolic rift and the development of rational agriculture in the countries of the capitalist core go hand in hand with the implementation of an unequal ecological exchange, which Marx already described regarding guano imports from Peru during the 1850’s. (Marx, 2009 ; Foster, 2000). Countries of the capitalist core claim ownership over natural spaces (those of colonized countries or under imperial domination) as well as embodied labour working-‐time in order to compensate for loss in soil fertility. Alf Hornborg describes this double process as “space-‐time appropriation” (Hornborg, 2005). For Hornborg -‐ as well as a number of other authors (Hornborg, McNeill, Martínez-‐Alier, 2007)-‐, the generalization of Marx’s unequal ecological exchange hypothesis in enabled by references to the dependency theory and the world-‐system analysis paradigm. In this
presentation, our aim is to discuss the pertinence of world-‐system theories in order to address the question of unequal ecological exchange by engaging a discussion with classical imperialism theories. Indeed, world-‐system theories offer pertinent elaborations that enable to consider the nature-‐society metabolic rift on a global scale (Moore, 2003), but they seem to fail to address forms of colonial-‐imperial predation that guarantee commercial domination of countries of the capitalist core and favour capitalist concentration (Marx, 2009 ; Davis, 2001).
Rodrigo Guimaraes Nunes
Between Clastres and Lenin: leadership and strategy in networked movements
While it is not accurate to describe the kinds of movements that have irrupted around the world in the last four years as ‘leaderless’, it is not far-‐fetched to see parallels between the ways in which leadership manifests itself in them and Pierre Clastres' portrayal of power in indigenous societies. The distributed leadership characteristic of today’s networked movements entails at once a permanently open possibility for leaders to emerge, and placing leadership under the requirement of constant legitimation, putting a check on its development. While the latter is no doubt a good thing in many respects (e.g., effectively functioning as an informal recall mechanism), it can also curb the strategic capacities of these movements. In this paper, I seek at first to develop a model of how distributed leadership functions, comparing it with Clastres’ work in political anthropology. I then submit it to questions on strategy and leadership raised from within the Marxist-‐Leninist tradition, in order to ask whether it is possible for networked movements to address those question, and how. What arises is the possibility of there actually being something between Clastres and Lenin, rather than a merely disjunctive choice between one or the other.
F. H. Pitts
Form-‐giving fire: creative industries as Marx’s ‘work of combustion
Capitalism struggles against the uncertainty of exchange: valorisation depends upon goods and services attaining commodity status by selling for money. Value is subject to this validation. I contend that the capitalist use of advertising, design and branding is among the most important means by which the possibility of this validation is guaranteed. I argue that these practices, traditionally seen as peripheral to the production of value, may actually be indispensable to it. This claim is based on a re-‐reading of the discussion of productive and unproductive labour found in Marx’s most direct treatment of the question of ‘circulation work’, in Capital Vol. 2. Situating the distinction between productive and unproductive labour as internal rather than prior to the law of value, I question the demarcation of ‘production’ and ‘realisation’ which has been used to relegate circulation work to an ancillary function. In making possible the conditions for the continued ‘realisation’ of value in the face of uncertainty, the services of advertising, design and branding recruited by
capitalists to stave off the possibility of non-‐validation simultaneously secure the basis for value to exist at all. In a climate of increasing instability, these sectors are therefore crucial to capitalism’s survival.
Peter Hallward
Guy Lardreau and Political Will
"Guy Lardreau was a leading figure of the Gauche prolétarienne, and his under-‐appreciated book Le Singe d'or (1973) is often and rightly recognised as the most important and symptomatic philosophical work to emerge from the French Maoist current in the years immediately following May 1968. In the mid 1970s, most notably in the idiosyncratic book L'Ange (1976) that he co-‐authored with Christian Jambet, Lardreau abandoned his remarkably strident version of Maoism in favour of positions that soon brought him close to the reactionary liberalism of the 'nouvelle philosophie'. This paper will assess both the force and frailty of Lardreau's early neo-‐Rousseauist voluntarism, before considering the peculiar form and implications of his subsequent self-‐criticism.
Barbara Harriss-‐White
Towards a lower carbon agriculture: An experiement in expert and situated knowledge in India
The coming phase of agrarian transformation will have to engage with climate change with many implications for methods for studying agrarian change. While literatures on agriculture and climate change currently focus on adaptation to dismal future scenarios and while the agricultural science establishment awaits a genetic revolution led by private capital, this paper reports on the public policy implications for mitigation of a project measuring environmental and social aspects of the agrarian economy.
Environmental factors include greenhouse gases (GHGs), energy and water; social factors focus on the quantity and quality of work; and the third, economic, element is constituted through a systematic analysis of market and social costs and returns. The case material is rice, in four production-‐distribution systems in E/SE India: intensive; rain-‐fed; systems of rice intensification (SRI); and organic.
After synergies and trade-‐offs between the environmental, social and economic parameters of agriculture have been measured/calculated, four technological possibilities which would help the transition towards lower carbon agriculture have been identified. These are rainfed rice production, SRI, solar pumps and halving T and D losses in the electricity grid.
Technological alternatives are generally evaluated using social cost-‐benefit analysis from economics ((S)CBA) in which all costs and benefits are reduced to Rs / $. Having criticised this orthodox approach, the experiment reported here uses a different method, derived from multi-‐criteria analysis which originated in engineering and has been championed and
developed by Sussex University researchers. Multi criteria mapping (MCM) enables a rigorous socio-‐political-‐economic evaluation of alternatives according to criteria which cannot be reduced to Rs/$ and are thus incommensurable. The incommensurable criteria in this exercise are costs, work relations/ labour process and GHGs.
The results of an experimental application of this method in two languages (English and Tamil) compare and contrast the evaluations of a set of expert ‘stakeholders’ from an elite class: the urban intelligentsia (scientists, rural development researchers, public policymakers, bankers, business managers and entrepreneurs, environmental journalists, and NGO activists (41%female)) with those of a ‘subaltern’ class: a set of rural producers with situated knowledge and direct experience (petty producers and landless agricultural labourers (48%female))."
Daniel Hartley
For a Marxist-‐Feminist Poetics of the ‘Anthropocene’
The name “Anthropocene,” and the theories of human history it implies, equivocates between humanism and technological determinism (is it humans who have produced the Anthropocene or the machines they have invented?). It also potentially implies a homogeneous, internally undifferentiated protagonist -‐ the so-‐called “anthropos” – thereby masking historical class antagonisms. To a certain extent, the Marxist tradition shares some of the difficulties of representation found in the discourse on the “Anthropocene”: the more a Spinozist-‐cum-‐Deleuzian Marxism emphasises the mode of production as an (immanent and non-‐human) assemblage, the more difficult it becomes to produce diachronic narratives structured around contradictions and antagonisms; on the other hand, the more one narrates human history in terms of class antagonism (an element usually missing from scientific writings on the Anthropocene) the more one reproduces the human-‐as-‐protagonist argument (and hence residual humanism) of the “anthropos.” This paper aims to explore these basic problems in order to suggest the ways in which our representations of the “Anthropocene” will directly affect our political practices in and towards it. It claims that the abstractly conceived struggle between “man” and “nature” cannot be overcome until class antagonisms internal to society have been resolved. Moreover, because of the early Marx’s unique conception of the male-‐female relation as the purest mediation between man [Mensch] and (historicized) nature, it argues that a Marxist politics of the “Anthropocene” – indeed, Marxist politics tout court – must have feminism at its heart. The “Anthropos” should be understood, not as a fact, but as a regulative idea whose realization would require universal emancipation.
Eva Hartmann
Competitive solidarity and the Europeanisation of the professions
"Critical scholars of European Studies point out that the EU is ordo-‐liberal rather than neo-‐liberal in its orientation. Along the lines of a Gramscian account of the ideational dimension of power we can consider ordo-‐liberal principles as being at the heart of the emerging European ethico-‐political project aiming to establish a new hegemony.
However, the critical accounts of ordo-‐liberalism have provided little insights so far into changes of the social formation induced by European competition and underpinning the new hegemony. This paper intends to overcome this shortcoming. It interrelates economic sociology and state theory with a view to deepening our understanding of the capital's capacity to survive.
The first part the paper will further refine this line of reasoning by drawing on insights provided by the sociology of professions and develops the notion of competitive solidarity. This field of study connects professions to broad sociological issues such as: occupational closure, social stratification, state formation and the development of a capitalist economic order. Against this theoretical backdrop, the paper examines, on more empirical grounds, the EU efforts to bring professional services within the ambit of the Community rules on competition and the implication this has for existing mediating mechanisms and social bonds organised through the professions."
Stephen Hastings-‐King
Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Contemporary Project of Autonomy
This paper argues that approaches drawn from Socialisme ou Barbarie can serve as templates for ways to make the socio-‐cognitive paralysis of the dominant neo-‐liberal imaginary and patterns of resistance to it available for a project of autonomy. The paper emphasizes the sociological orientation of the group’s work, which enabled adaptation of radical politics to the changing geographies and organization of capitalism of the 1950s and early 60s. SB focused on the close analysis of relations of production to isolate informal patterns of assimilation and resistance to Fordist production design and technological organization. Their later notion of total social crisis leaned on the earlier, granular analyses of worker experience along with a model drawn from the Hungarian Revolution to orient exploration of newer forms of social contestation. Since 1967, the gradual collapse of the Marxist Imaginary has pulled down an entire language in terms of which collective desires for emancipation might have been articulated. This situation is what separates us from SB. We face starting over. Much recent activity ignores work and related modes of experience. In so doing, opposition to the dominant capitalist imaginary deprives itself of a necessary descriptive base and undermines new theoretical approaches.
Michael Haynes
Neo-‐Liberalism and the Crimogenic University
"This paper argues that as mass higher education has developed so the form of the university has changed. In recent decades in societies like the UK this change as led to universities coming to have an increasingly crimogenic form. Universities are expected to operate and set goals for themselves that appear to be of the most worthy and ethical kind but their day to day practices mean that they must and do routinely violate these. Moreover a case can be made that these violations are as sustained and egregious as many of the activities that other businesses are condemned for doing. Staffs live out these contradictions on a daily basis and are expected to be complicit in them even though they know that if exposed the institution is more likely to condemn and dismiss them than address the underlying pressures that they are responding to.
Resisting this requires a reinvigoration of critical thinking and more vigorous workplace resistance that overcomes the sectionalism that characterises the higher education workforce. It also requires stronger links externally and a more engaged role of academics as critical public intellectuals. We briefly sketch how the role of the university has developed with pressures to commodify and marketise the university creating a form of academic capitalism. We then looks at some of the illicit activities involved in the recruitment, teaching and assessment of students; research practices; and the running of the institutions themselves. The final part rehearses some of the arguments about engagement and the ways in which the space for critical discussion and activism might be defended and opened up."
James Heartfield
The Manchester Workers, the US Civil War, and the founding of the IWMA
"Ed Hooson and John Edwards launched the Union Emancipation Society in Manchester in 1862, building solidarity with the Union and Lincoln in the American Civil War. Their campaign across the mill towns of Lancashire helped stop Lords Russell and Palmerston from joining the war on the side of the Confederacy.
Karl Marx joined their campaign, organising meetings in London, with the men who would go on to found the International Working Men's Association. Drawing on the material researched for the pamphlet British Workers and the US Civil War, this introduction will show how international solidarity helped to re-‐launch the workers movement in Britain, and influence it in the world."
Paul Heideman & Jonah Birch
What Does it Mean to Call Neoliberalism a Class Project?
"For the Marxist left, it is axiomatic that the ""neoliberal"" restructuring of world capitalism during the past thirty years has been a class project, pursued in the interests of capital (or fractions thereof). For much of the past two decades, this understanding has been
challenged by the institutional scholarship on comparative capitalism. The institutionalist literature on recent changes in advanced capitalism has stressed the point that in many regions, key reform efforts have been launched either through negotiated agreements and cross-‐class alliances between business and labor, or alternately without the direct intervention of firms or their interest-‐group representatives. In fact, social science researchers have pointed out, employers have often lacked the political will or organizational wherewithal to oversee neoliberalism, given that they have in many cases been disorganized to an even greater extent than labor.
What then does it mean to call neoliberalism a class project? I will argue that the class context of the neoliberal trajectory of capitalist political economies reflects its disparate impact on the relative power of class actors, as opposed to the nature of the agents that have driven it. The directionality of recent changes in advanced capitalism has been determined not by the organized or conscious intervention of any particular social or political force, but rather by the structural imperatives facing business, labor, and the state, and the way these have shaped responses to altered conditions of capital accumulation since the 1970s."
Christoph Henning
Alienation: Defending the Classical Theory with new arguments
"Marx analyzed alienation as an externalisation and misappropriation of human potentials. This theory is straightforward – so much so that is has been „absorbed“ into the philosophical mainstream, e.g. of Charles Taylor and even Jürgen Habermas, under the guise of the concept of 'expressivism'. Ironically, however, at the time of this 'triumph' many Marxists and Critical theorists of the late 20th century abandonded the concept, following Althusser's and Foucault's anti-‐essentialist stance instead, forsaking the chance to strive for an intellectual 'hegemony'. Even more ironically, this refusal to take on the „humanistic“ heritage of Critical Marxism dovetailed with a postmodernist resurgence of 'positive' theories of alienation. Influenced by the Sociology of Georg Simmel, scholars of Philosophical anthropology (e.g. Arnold Gehlen or Helmuth Plessner) or System theory (Niklas Luhmann), these theories argue that alienation is the price of modern freedom – or even its condition: It cuts the bonds to traditional authorities and enables individuals to live according to their own plans. This modernist 'appeal' of alienation partly explains why capitalist culture is so persisting: It is not necessarily 'false consciousness' to accept a commodified culture and lifestyle; it may also be the result of a quite reflective choice. Here my paper wants to ask: What kind of arguments does Marxism have to offer against these two strands of thought (postmodernist anti-‐essentialism and post-‐critical ironicism)? Based on new research in various fields (such as bioethics or sociology of global labor) I will argue that the classical theory of alienation still has explanatory power, if applied consistently. In a globalised neoliberalism, many people suffer even more from processes of alienation then before. The only difficulty is to demonstrate conceptually in which way these new
phenomena 'fit' the old concept, and why it makes sense to do connect new phenomena with new concepts at all.
Lars Henriksson
Auto Workers Can Save the World
"The divide between unions defending jobs and individuals and organizations questioning the environmental impact of various industries and products is old. The current dual crisis of economy and climate is simultaneously sharpening this tension and calling for a solution as it becomes obvious that environmental issues, far from being luxury problems, are fundamental to our survival.
This is specially evident in the auto industry. Road transports are responsible for a big and growing share of the green house gas emissions and all measures to reduce these emissions have been outweighed by the ever increasing road traffic. Continued mass auto transit is not a sustainable system, not the one that exists today and even less so if the car density of the industrialized countries would be globalized.
The credit crunch of 2008 triggered a crisis of overproduction that had been endemic in the auto industry for a long time. Worldwide, unions' response was support to“their” corporations, ranging from demands for state subsidies to contractual concessions.
Ever since then I've been arguing that in stead of giving in to the false choice between ”creative destruction” and subsidized mass auto transit, unions could and should adopt and organize around demands for a conversion of the auto industrial complex.
The auto industry is a flexible and versatile machinery for mass production of just about any high quality industrial goods. A nationalized industry could create safe jobs and supply society with the goods needed to replace the present fossil dependence.
Merely good arguments will not be sufficient. Industry's main interest in a capitalist society is expansion and pursuit for profit. The powers that be will defend status quo, however asocial or destructive. Reason has to be armed with social muscles.
The labor movement, and specially unions in sectors where production is intrinsically unsustainable, have a possibility of becoming an important part of this necessary social force in that they have a direct material interest in a transformation, both to save jobs and the planet. Unions constitute in themselves a strong social force and they can become the hub of a broad movement involving popular forces from the whole of the society.
The employees also have a first hand knowledge that is essential in a conversion. In questioning the direction of the production we also have an opportunity to question and transform our jobs that have been deskilled and deprived of content for so long."
Anna Hermanson
Contesting violent representations in the petrostate: patriarchy, colonialism, and big oil advertising in Alberta
Extraction and processing of the tar sands in northern Alberta constitute one of the largest energy projects in the world today. The related environmental, social, and climatic violence is immense and impossible to fully represent. In this paper I will show that existing structures of power, such as capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, work to construct alternative representations of industrial projects in the Albertan petrostate. I will use an advertisement for an Edmonton radio station that violently objectifies a woman’s body to iterate its support for big oil as a starting point for examining the history of gendered violence against Indigenous women in Canada and a broader relationship between patriarchy and extraction. Then, I will examine the government of Alberta and big oil’s use of Indigenous bodies in tar sands advocacy campaigns and posit these representations as tools of contemporary capitalism and colonialism. In my discussion, after illustrating the connections between patriarchy, colonialism and environmental violence, I will propose intersectional and anti-‐colonial contestations of existing representations that do violence as integral to resistance.
Andy Higginbottom
The multinational corporation -‐ concentration, fiction or rent?
Capitalism survives as globalised imperialism, a world dominated by multinational corporations whose pre-‐eminence signifies important changes in the capitalist mode of production. How then does historical geographical materialism approach the theorisation of multinational corporate capital?
This paper develops three strands. Firstly, standard Marxist explanations highlight the concentration and centralisation of capital, processes located in Marx’s exposition of the general law of accumulation. What if the general law is itself modified by imperialism as ‘monopoly capitalism’, how does monopoly correspond with the concentration and centralisation of capital? Secondly the analysis revisits Hilferding’s Finance Capital and the specific focus on fictitious capital and corporation organisation: promoter’s profit, credit and the double movement of capital. Thirdly, in asking what are super-‐profits in relation to Marx’s categories, we come to the theory of imperialist rent and its application to forms of multinational capital.
These concepts are applied to a concrete study of the City of London’s role as a centre of financing of global mining capital, conceived as predatory production. The paper ends with observations on the political implications of the analysis.
Rocio Hiraldo
Classes of labour experience and respond to green grabs: economic consequences of territorialisation through mangrove conservation in Niombato, Senegal.
As land expropriation for the expansion of capital increases, a wide range of scholars are using Marxist terms such as primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession to describe these processes, inter alia those studying the conservation-‐capitalism nexus. This is leading to revised critiques of these concepts as well as to a return of the agrarian question debate, in particular to an exploration of the socio-‐economic consequences of land grabs. By studying processes of economic and political change in the Sine Saloum Delta, Senegal, this paper explores the effects of a tourism-‐oriented protected area in the ways villagers are securing material reproduction. The paper argues that rather than simply driving villagers into a class category of producers exploited by the capitalist class, green grabs are contributing to perpetuate a ‘classes of labour’ pattern where villagers secure material reproduction through a complex combination of informal survival activities in and out of wage-‐labour. The paper also highlights the need to look at differentiation between different petty commodity producers (in relation to capital and means of production) in order to understand the material consequences of land grabs as well as villagers’ responses to them.
Owen Holland
Orwell's Windows
When the liberal humanist Milan Kundera attacked George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) as an example of “political thought disguised as a novel” he did so on the grounds that “there are no windows” in the book. Strictly speaking, this is incorrect. The word appears precisely thirty-‐three times in 1984 – a point which one hopes was not lost on Georgiy Daneliya, the director of the 1965 Soviet comedy Thirty-‐Three. Orwell’s windows, far more than the ubiquitous tele-‐screens, refract an apprehension about transparency whose lineage encompasses, inter alia, Vera’s dream of a crystal palace in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done (1863), Ivan Karamazov’s legend of the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s philosophical novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the glass-‐world of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Walter Benjamin’s fascination with the glass constructions of nineteenth-‐century Parisian arcades and Ernst Bloch’s ruminations on the Bauhaus. Circa 2014, liberal humanist mobilisations of dystopian writing as a distorted reflection of an imputed ‘left totalitarianism’ require some revision – particularly as the fantasy of total transparency can now be seen to have set in place the technological architecture of a twenty-‐first century totalitarianism. What then, if anything, do Orwell’s windows have to tell us about the NSA?
Alistair Holmes
Race, Class & Empire in Britain: 1837-‐1914
"This paper looks at the development of racism in Britain during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Beginning in the shadow of abolition, I trace the hardening of racial
prejudice into the modern racism of ‘science’, Social Darwinism and Eugenics. By looking at the experience of Black, Irish and Jewish people living in and visiting Britain I examine the twisting evolution of racism and the construction of whiteness. Above all, this reveals a complex relationship between class and race, with racist tropes often originating in perceptions about social class, and a lack of clear distinctions between ethnicity, biology and ‘civilisation’ resulting in anything but the established ‘black and white’ definition of racism we are familiar with today. I also look at how discourses formed in the colonial context came to inform analyses of class division at home, and how anti-‐colonial resistance impacted on the development of ideas in the metropole. Political changes within Britain posited the need for an inclusive nationalism as an antidote to the dangers of socialism. At the same time, growing concerns about the degeneration and decline of the 'residuum' undermined the liberal ideas of progress and civilisation underpinning British imperial identity.
The central thrust of my argument is that far from being defined purely in distinction to a colonial, non-‐white other, the various strands of racist ideology prevalent in turn-‐of-‐the-‐century Britain evolved as much out of schisms within British society than without. Most importantly, these developments were borne of the historically contingent needs of British capitalism rather than a trans-‐historical division between ‘East’ and ‘West’ embedded in Western thought. In turn, the nature of this racism crystallised through the experience of political change and resistance at home and abroad, and the project of constructing a unifying British nationalism in the context of a global Empire."
Pertti Honkanen
Marx, Mathematics and New Capital-‐Lectures
In this paper some thesis of the “monetary theory of value” are analysed and brought into the context of broader discussions of the Marxist methodology.
In recent years in Marxist discussions much has been written about “new Capital Lectures”. Intense studies of the manuscripts and writings published in the MEGA Edition are one source of inspiration. The discussions and studies consider many aspects of the critique of political economy, especially the methodology and the theory of value. Obviously some conclusions of these studies are quite evident or generally approved. So it can be stressed that we cannot identify the Marxist theory of value with the Ricardian theory of value. The analysis of the form of value and the theory of money are an essential part of the Marxist theory of value. It is generally ignored in non-‐Marxist studies and also often in the so-‐called traditional Marxism.
Nevertheless there are some controversies and problems which need more analysis. The so-‐called monetary theory of value is one controversial line in these lectures. So the thesis that abstract labour time cannot be measured with clock and that money is the only measure of
value, are, in my opinion, questionable. So is also the corollary, that the total labour time of society cannot be understood as some homogenous entity.
If the abstract labour time cannot be measured or, more generally, if it is not a definite quantity, the quantitative relations between prices and values cannot be analysed on theoretical level. All discussions about the so-‐called transformation problem become obsolete. It is also difficult to make conclusions about the dynamics of capitalism, if (abstract) labour time is a variable, which cannot be measured or defined. Even in the elementary concept of productivity of labour the quantitative definition of labour time is essential.
It seems to me that in the critique of the traditional Marxism sometimes the child is thrown away with the washing water. The confusion of empirical measurement of labour time and theoretical understanding value relations is, may be, one reason of this phenomenon.
These questions bring us back to the discussions of the role of quantitative and qualitative analysis and the role of mathematics in the work of Marxist critique of political economy and also to the discussions about the status of labour theory of value in Marxist theory."
Peter Hudis
Frantz Fanon’s Contribution to Hegelian Marxism
Although the work of Frantz Fanon has become an staple of post-‐colonialist and anti-‐imperialist theory over the past several decades, his contribution to Hegelian-‐Marxism, as especially found in Black Skin, White Masks and other writings, has been largely neglected by scholars and activists alike. This paper will seek to correct this oversight by showing that Fanon’s critical engagement with the “master/slave” dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology not only governed his critique of Negritude and Jean-‐Paul Sartre, but also formed the basis of his understanding of the promise and pitfalls of national consciousness found in such later works as The Wretched of the Earth. I will also argue that Fanon’s distinctive reading of Hegel marked an important point of departure from the philosophical positions advanced by Alexandre Kojève, Theodor Adorno, and contemporary writers on recognition. A critical re-‐evaluation of the impact of Fanon’s study of Hegel will show that he deserves a place as one of the most important figures within Hegelian Marxism.
Elizabeth Humphrys and Tad Tietze
‘Abolishing the present state of things’: reconstructing Marx’s critique of politics and the state
A range of social critics has pointed to the hollowing out of previously entrenched representative political institutions and the growth of popular anti-‐politics sentiment during the late neoliberal era in Western democracies. Antonio Gramsci’s prediction of a ‘crisis of authority’ where ‘social classes become detached from their traditional parties’ seems to
have come to pass, yet without a breakdown of bourgeois hegemony or a breakthrough by revolutionary political projects. By reconstructing Karl Marx’s early critique of politics and the state – often inaccurately dismissed as immature and undeveloped as compared with his later critique of political economy – we will outline its relevance to the current anti-‐political conjuncture. Drawing on the work of Lucio Colletti, Gary Teeple, Derek Sayer and Peter Thomas, we will argue that grasping the essential nature of the relationship between state and civil society, and the limits of political emancipation vis-‐à-‐vis social liberation can lay the basis for theorising a significantly different approach to ‘the political’ to that which has been dominant within the Western revolutionary Left for the last century. Furthermore, we contend that this new approach is immanent in the practical activity of the emerging anti-‐political social movements of our time.
Filip Ilkowski
"New Warsaw Pact", beggar imperialism and power politics in Central and Eastern Europ
The recent events in Ukraine have shown that imperialism is still an important issue in the area of former Eastern Bloc. It is important to see it as a newest expression of the tendencies visible in the last 25 years: in particular NATO enlargement and existence of "New Warsaw Pact" countries very much loyal to USA, and on the other hand attempts to rebuild its power position by Russia. But countires within the former Eastern Bloc are not only pawns in great powers games. One can also see the phemomenon of "beggar imperialism" -‐ ambitious and independent in its aims but at the same time dependent of external help to achieve them. In addition, economic and social crisis after 2008, with it uneven impact in the area, is an important framework of recent geopolitical competition between bigger and smaller actors in the Eastern Europe.
Orazio Irrera
Environmentality between Primitive Accumulation and Colonial Biopolitics.
The struggle for the use of the forests in Himalayan India (1864-‐1931) Through the notion of “Environmentality”, coined at first by Arjun Agrawal, this contribution aims at combining two paradigms in order to approach colonial environmental history from an innovative point of view: on the one hand the Marxist perspective based on primitive accumulation and, on the other hand, the Foucauldian biopolitical prism through which scientific discourses, governmental technologies, and political resistances turn out to be strictly intertwined also in the case of environmental colonial history (even if Foucault never dealt with it). More exactly, we focus on the relevant question of the management of the forests in the circumscribed colonial area of some sub-‐Himalayan regions and during a particular period (1864-‐1931). Thus, we try to link the “ecological imperialism” featuring the capitalistic drive in nineteenth century British India to the relationship between the development of scientific forestry, the creation of the Imperial Forest Department (1864)
regulating the scientific forest management in sub-‐Himalayan India, and the resistance of native people threatened by this management. This long period of struggle concluded with the 1931 Forest Panchayat Rules that sanctioned the emergence of rural communities as environmental subjectivities able both to provide some forms of self-‐government in ecological management and to struggle against market-‐oriented policies.
Robert Jackson
Postone, Lebowitz and Subjectivity in Marx's Capital
"Marx's characterisation of capital as a “self-‐moving substance”, the subject of its own process, has led Moishe Postone to posit capital as the primary subject of Capital. Whilst Postone’s interpretation highlights the function of capital as non-‐personal social domination, this paper will argue that his interpretation is challenged by Marx’s analysis of the influence of class struggle on the functioning of the laws of capitalist production.
The paper will discuss the concrete forms of working class self-‐activity found in Marx's chapter, The Working Day. It will further examine the interaction between the workers' movement and the factory inspectors, and their significance for the role of a knowing subject in the process of class struggle.
For Michael Lebowitz, Postone’s argument is possible because of a crucial silence in Capital. The paper will also assess Lebowitz's claim that Marx does not explore the subjective side of the capital/wage-‐labour relation in his later writings. It will evaluate Lebowitz’s project to overcome a one-‐sided reading of Marx’s project by theorising the “creation of new social needs for workers”."
Daniel Jakopovich
The Class Functions of British Militarism
"The presentation examines the structural functions of the military-‐industrial complex, and the bases of its power. I demonstrate its continued relevance for the global economic and geopolitical positioning of the British ruling class, its capitalist and state elites. The UK military-‐industrial complex has a uniquely important place among the mechanisms and apparatuses of class power due to its designated purpose of protecting the existing system of domestic and global class relations, and of increasing British economic and geopolitical leverage on the global level. British militarism is a multi-‐faceted form of intervention in the processes of international (political and economic) competition, and it supports the entire architecture of global capitalism, including the international rule-‐making and agenda-‐setting institutions. The long-‐term Anglo-‐American political and military alliance in particular is a highly ambitious and expansionistic form of global power projection and systemic organisation.
The presentation shall also elaborate the main features of this system of militarised state capitalism, which is founded on the increasing privatisation and oligarchisation of the politics and of the state, the institutional capture of the state and the wider public sphere by oligopolistic private interests. “Militarised state capitalism” is based on the neo-‐colonial extraction of global resources and the redistribution of wealth from the British taxpayers to private military companies, a privileged oligopolistic fraction of the capitalist class. I shall demonstrate that militarism functions as a method of subordinating the state in accordance with oligopolistic and monopolistic private corporate interests. Additionally, the presentation will show that the military-‐industrial complex helps to ensure the domestic and international political security and reliability required to secure the investment of wealthy Oriental despots and other segments of the Middle Eastern and global capitalist elite, on whose support the continued dominance of the City of London, of other powerful British industries, and of the UK offshore system partly depend. I shall also discuss the integration of the energy and financial industries within the military-‐industrial complex, as well as the role of the military-‐industrial complex in the integration of the ruling class (through shared socialisation, lobbying and the contribution of the military-‐industrial complex to political campaigning, cronyism, the “revolving door” between senior military and corporate positions and political office, financialisation, interlocking directorships, etc.).
In conclusion, I shall indicate how the military-‐industrial complex and the “security state” contribute to an increasingly totalitarian concentration of social, economic and political power.
(In the discussion afterwards I might also have time to properly discuss the issue of military ""Keynesianism"". This research is based on my PhD thesis on class power in Britain at the University of Cambridge, which is a couple of weeks away from completion. I gave a two hour guest lecture on the British military-‐industrial complex at Cambridge, and an article on the topic has been accepted for publication by Cuadernos de Marte, a South American journal specialising in the sociology of war.)"
Muhammad Ali Jan
Class, State and the 'making' of Indigeneous capital in a global milieu: a case study of the Pakistani Punjab
Perhaps nowhere in the historical materialist tradition has the tension between theory and history been greater than in the analysis of Imperialism and the global political economy. As the most abstract yet necessary concept, the ‘global’ or the ‘world’ has been the source of endless debate within Marxism -‐ from Lenin’s analysis of inter-‐imperialist rivalry, to ‘dependency’ and 'world-‐systems' theories to present day debates over the ‘transnational’ capitalist class. Among these, no framework has invited greater enthusiasm or criticism than the world-‐systems approach; scholars have chided world-‐systems theorists for their functionalist and deterministic view of exploitation while the latter have accused their critics
of glossing over a highly unequal international order and its effects on the nature and pattern of capitalist development in the ‘periphery’. This paper argues that while many of the debates among both defenders and detractors of world-‐systems and dependency approaches brought about considerable advances in our understanding of capitalist accumulation on a world-‐scale, 3 fundamental elements are essential if we are to grasp unequal development more fully; firstly, unlike dependency theory and world-‐systems, it is not the ‘nation’ but the international social relation between national capitals of different strengths in the framework of what Marx called the ‘competition of capitals’ which should be the focus of attention; second, in order to avoid purely economistic understandings of class formation and capital accumulation the role of the state must be central to the analysis. Finally, it must be recognized that this relationship of hierarchy is historically constituted so that a long term perspective on the 'making' and development of ‘national’ capitalist classes is crucial for an understanding of both the continuities and discontinuities in its relationship both to international capital and domestic working classes. Drawing on South Asian economic history and with a particular focus on Pakistani Punjab, this paper then demonstrates how the historical interplay between British and indigenous capital as well as the colonial state, was crucial in the making of an indigenous capitalist class, drawn from landed, mercantile and bureaucratic groups, that came to rely not on technological improvement, but cheapening of labour-‐power as its differencia specifica and whose patterns of investment were crucial in determining the nature of accumulation and its outcomes for the exploitation and welfare of labour. If the survival of capitalism is to be fully understood then one needs to analyze this making of state and capital as an interplay with the ‘global’ so that not only the strengths of capital are revealed, but its vulnerabilities exposed so that radical praxis can transform it.
Heesang Jeon
Knowledge and the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production in capitalism
Commodities have the dual characteristic, being both value and use-‐value, and so does knowledge: knowledge specifies what to produce, i.e. use-‐value, and how to produce (production technologies); at the same time, it determines the complexity and productivity of commodity-‐producing labour, that is, the value productivity of commodity-‐producing labour, see Jeon (2011) *. Deriving from the abstract and fundamental opposition between value and use-‐value, the dual characteristics of knowledge is distinguished from other forms such as the opposition between money and commodities and the separation of purchase and sale. These developed and concrete forms are the abstract (but real) basis of economic crisis, which not only reveals the contradictory and unstable nature of the capitalist mode of production, but also enables the economy to recover from crises, by restoring balance between sectors, increasing profit rates or eradicating overproduction facilities. By contrast, the dual characteristics of knowledge, as expressed in the contradiction between the forces
of the capitalist production and its relations of production, points to the eventual demise of capitalism. Value production, driving incessant accumulation of knowledge, will eventually reach the point where production stops being the means of satisfying human needs and reproducing the society, the basis of value production. * Heesang Jeon (2011), The Value and Price of Information Commodities: An Assessment of the South Korean Controversy, in Paul Zarembka, Radhika Desai (ed.) Revitalizing Marxist Theory for Today's Capitalism (Research in Political Economy, Volume 27), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.191-‐222.
Cedric Johnson
Between Revolution and the Racial Ghetto: Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood Debate Class Struggle and the “Negro Question,” 1962-‐1968
This paper revisits an historic exchange between two black ex-‐Communists, Harold Cruse and Harry Haywood. Their debate was precipitated by Cruse’s influential 1962 essay for Studies on the Left, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-‐American,” which declared that the American Negro was a “subject of domestic colonialism.” Written against the prevailing liberal integrationist commitments of the civil rights movement, his essay called for black economic and political independence, and inspired many of the younger activists who would give birth to the black power movement. In a series of essays for the Bay Area black radical journal, Soulbook, Haywood criticized Cruse’s mishandling of class politics among blacks, and his retreat from anti-‐capitalism. Their exchange was in many ways, a debate with the wider American Left, old and new, during an historical epoch when the struggles against southern Jim Crow segregation gave way to black power militancy and urban revolt, and many activists proclaimed that the “black vanguard” had supplanted the mass worker as the leading edge of left revolutionary politics in the United States and beyond. This forgotten episode is important on its own terms, for what it says about the character and limitations of left political thinking during the sixties, and equally for understanding commonsensical notions of African American public life in our times which too often remain rooted in the vanished sociological context and political realities of the twentieth century racial ghetto.
Jonny Jones Some thoughts on 'anti-‐politics' in austerity Britain
The Australian Marxists Elizabeth Humphrys and Tad Tietze have suggested that there presently exists a widespread mood of ‘anti-‐politics’, stemming from a ‘crisis of representation that leads most people to see politics as completely detached from their lives.’ Their analysis proceeds from an interpretation of Marx’s critique of politics and the state, as well as from Gramsci’s insights into the processes by which classes and class fractions become ‘detached from their traditional parties.’
In analyses of the Australian political class, and in Luke Stobart’s work on the 15-‐M movement and the growth of Podemos in the Spanish state, it appears that this rejection of the political mainstream
can lead to disparate outcomes depending on, among other factors, the balance of class forces and the strategies pursued by the political classes and the left to relate to the anti-‐politics mood and the movements that it imbues.
In this paper, I hope to assess the applicability of Humphrys’ and Tietze’s broad conception of anti-‐politics to analysis of political developments in Britain since the 2010 student revolt, such as the anti-‐austerity movement and the recent emergence of UKIP as an electoral force; and to examine its implications for revolutionary strategy in Britain.
Timothy Joubert
Gendering the Social Factory: Marxism, Social Reproduction, and Women's Oppression
"This paper examines the ability of Marxist theory to comprehend gender oppression and trace the material base(s) of women’s oppression. A critical survey of relevant literature and discussion is presented in the two main topic areas of ‘reproductive labour’, a concept some Marxists have used to attempt to locate the basis of gender oppression, and sexual violence, which Marxists have often been hesitant to theorise about. In particular, this paper focuses on the arguments of feminist-‐Marxists in the Italian Autonomist tradition to interrogate the relationship between women’s particular relation to capitalist production (exploitation in the domestic sphere) and their ideological and material subordination. It is argued that the gendered organisation of social reproduction is determinate of a broader social labour relation between women and men, articulated through immaterial ‘affective’ labours, and disciplined by sexual violence. Building on the Autonomist concept of the ‘social factory’, these relations of gender form a fundamental constituent part of capitalist class relations and are central to the circuit of capitalist accumulation, an understanding that Marxism must grasp in order to confront women’s oppression.
Christoph Jünke
Leo Kofler’s Marxism and the New Left in postwar Germany: Mentor and persona non grata at the same time
"Leo Kofler (1907-‐1995) was an Austrian-‐German social philosopher and social theorist who ranks with Ernst Bloch, the Marburg politicologist Wolfgang Abendroth and the Frankfurt school theoretician Adorno among the few well-‐known Marxist intellectuals in post-‐war Germany. However, almost nothing of his work was ever translated into English, and he is therefore little known in the English-‐speaking world. More than that, even in Germany this major leftwing thinker, proponent of the first generation of a German New Left in the 1950’s and 1960’s, is virtually absent from left discourses.
In trying to explain the deeper causes of that split, Christoph Jünke explores the main outlines of Kofler’s distinctive interpretation of Marxism, which connected sociology and
history with aesthetics and philosophical anthropology. On this background he portrays him and his theory of a progressive elite as an original and fruitful answer to the structural problems not only of the German left; as an interesting attempt to situate the struggles of the 60’s and 70’s in the historical continuum of the transition from classical socialism to postmodernism; and as an early attempt to clear the problems of the contemporary multitude.
Trish Kahle
The Graveyard Shift: Energy Industry Reorganization and Rank and File Rebellion in the United Mine Workers of America, 1963-‐1973
This paper examines the link between reorganization of American energy production and the ability of workers to forge political spaces to challenge capital within their unions, thus illuminating how capitalism survived the energy and political crises of the 1970s. Energy production in the United States underwent a striking transformation in the 1960s and 1970s as nuclear power expanded rapidly. The struggle over what fuel—coal or uranium—would power the United States placed Appalachian coal miners at the center of a process that less represented a struggle between fuels as it did a process of capitalist consolidation and industry reorganization. Within a decade, energy production transformed from a series of discrete industries rooted in a single source fuel to a smaller number of energy conglomerates with diverse fuel investments. Contextualized by this transformation, the union democracy movement in the United Mine Workers of America appears not only as an internal struggle over democratic practices, but also a broad political struggle. The political space forged in the UMWA by the Miners for Democracy was able to entertain radical solutions to long-‐standing problems exacerbated by a series of concurrent crises: mine safety, rank and file power, and environmental destruction.
Giorgos Kalampokas
Violence, history, encounter: Political, philosophical and historical implications of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation
"The object of this paper is the theoretical approach of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation as a theory of the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. Following Marx’s text, we seek the theoretical status of Marx’s analysis’ central notions, such as encounter and violence, and also its theoretical place inside the overall Marxian work. Tracking Marx’s text’s internal tensions as well as the tension between Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation and a teleological, determinist and productivist approach of history and of the succession of the modes of production -‐an approach which can also be met elsewhere in Marx’s work and dominates many of its interpretations-‐, we try to acknowledge in his analysis of primitive accumulation those elements that can renew the theoretical grounds of historical materialism and some of its most important categories –
like the mode of production and value-‐ as well as their historicity. In this context, we seek the possible consequences of Marx’s view of primitive accumulation for a philosophical and theoretical approach of history and politics.
Following Louis Althusser’s trail, our thesis resides on the argument that, contrary to an approach of history as a predefined, evolutionary, in the final analysis “smooth”, succession of modes of production that follows the growth of productive forces –a process like the one Marx himself presents in the 1859 “Preface”-‐, in his study of primitive accumulation he presents the emergence of the capitalist mode of production as a long process of social transformation, both the starting point and the progress of which are as such aleatory and subjected only to class struggle and its new emerging forms. In our view Marx sets the encounter between social forms that have historically emerged independently from one another right at the center of his analysis of the emergence of the capitalist mode of production. We argue that this specific interaction between these social forms is, as we call it, an overdetermined encounter which historically modulates new relations of production and a new mode of production.
For Marx violence is also set at the very core of primitive accumulation. Contrary to the common Marxian theorization according to which violence holds nothing but a secondary part in historical progress standing only as the needed “friction” of social phenomena with reality -‐phenomena that as such are determined by different laws-‐, we argue that Marx attributes a transformative and constitutive character to violence. In this framework, Marx also highlights the crucial part of the state in the emergence of capitalist relations thus providing a new perspective to the relation between the political and the economical element during the emergence of capitalism, as opposed to another common Marxian approach that would consider the first to be only an “expression” of the latter attributing to the economic element an absolute casual primacy. We argue that Marx, on the contrary, highlights from the very beginning the significance of state intervention and of the political, extra-‐economical coercion for the making of new relations of social production and their reproduction.
Given this analysis, in our final remarks we will try to put forward a political and philosophical practice of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation appealing to the contemporary pursue of a communist revolutionary strategy."
Onur Kapdan
Irregular Times: Gezi Uprising in Turkey -‐ Radical Subjectivity vs. The State’s Capitalism
"The 2013 Gezi Park protests constituted a new type of horizontal social struggle that went beyond earlier Turkish politics, whether leftist or nationalist. This movement, which organized horizontally and involved a new generation of youth occupying public space added yet another node to the global upheavals since 2011. The movement, however,
complicates the discontent with capitalism and representative democracy shared by all of these movements. Turkey has been one of the emerging economies of the last decade under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which also continues to draw significant support from the population.
In this context, the anti-‐capitalism in the youth’s radical subjectivity is often concealed by their immediate anti-‐authoritarian demands against Prime Minister Erdoğan and the AKP. Consequently, Gezi appears to be a cultural uprising of the “new petty bourgeoisie,” à la Poulantzas. This paper argues against this appearance based on an ongoing dissertation research into the roots of Gezi and the consequent neighborhood assemblies. Doing so, it assesses the validity of following strict capitalist class divisions to understand the Turkish context, and contends that capitalism in Turkey is primarily driven by the state’s chosen capitalists, as the recent carnage at the Soma coalmine has further revealed. The paper asserts that the State’s capacity to choose who and what accumulates capital, and Erdoğan’s attempt to build an ideological hegemony, shows youth’s radical subjectivity is a negation of capitalism, whose own contradictions are also preliminarily analyzed in the paper."
Elif Karacimen & Annina Kaltenbrunner
Financialisation in the Middle Income Countries: An Analysis of the Changing Investment and Financing Behaviours of Non-‐Financial Corporations in Turkey and Brazil
The last few decades have been marked by the broadening and deepening role of finance, which is often discussed with reference to the term “financialisation”. It is evident that much has been written on the subject in the context of core capitalist countries. This paper discusses how financialisation might fit as an analytical tool for exploring changes in the economies of middle income countries, by drawing on the experiences of Brazil and Turkey. In adopting the financialisation approach, this study aims to go beyond the dichotomous understanding of “finance” and “real” economy. It focuses on the new dynamics in both realms and the interconnections between the two. It argues that one of the crucial points to consider in analysing the financialisation in middle income countries is to understand the changes in the mode of integration of those countries into the world economy and accompanied transformations in the financial and non-‐financial sectors of these economies vis-‐à-‐vis their internal dynamics. One of the major characteristics of middle income countries over the last decade has been their deepening integration into the world economy through trade, foreign direct investment and capital flows, a process which has been supported by the changes in their monetary policies. Throughout the period, there have been important changes in the financing and investment behaviour of non-‐financial companies. The aim of this study is to discuss these changes in the behaviour of NFCs in relation to an array of transformations that those economies have undergone over the last decade. It addresses the dearth of empirical work on financialisation of NFCs in middle income countries by examining the changes in the asset and liability structures of the major NFCs in Turkey and Brazil. Situated in a broader context, this analysis sheds lights on the
how NFCs have been integrated into production chains centred in advanced economies and how they have also been able to raise funds through international capital markets. Based upon its analysis, this study addresses two major questions. First, it explores the implications of the changes in practices and behaviours of NFCs for the capital accumulation processes of these countries. Second, it discusses the increased exposure of NFCs to financial risk posed by volatile exchange rates and international capital flows and its implications for those economies.
İsmail Karatepe
Housing, the state and intervention: Placing Turkey in an international context
"Since November 2002, when the Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept the victory in Turkey’s parliamentary elections with an overwhelming majority, the governments’ direct involvement into the construction industry has been drastically expanded. Concerning the increasing government activities in the construction industry, a public agency, the Housing Development Administration of Turkey (TOKI) deserves special attention. The administration, which had been initially established to carry out social housing projects in the year 1984, became a significant player in the construction industry, especially in the residential unit provision.
I seek to find an answer to the question of whether successive AKP governments’ direct involvement in the dwelling provisions is in line with ongoing trends in the world. To this end, one of the main components of this study is designed to discuss the trends elsewhere. Housing policies in Turkey appears to have undergone major transformations in the last decade, involving drastic expansions in public housing provision. Yet, neither the presence of public housing nor its transformation is unique to Turkey. Regarding with public housing and its regulatory institution, indeed, several counterparts all around the world can be identified, and variety ways of transformation can be observed. However, I claim that the social housing through TOKI is reasonably interesting case. I will discuss that the public housing in Turkey can be distinguished operationally (how and to what extent it involves in the sector), financially (how is social housing financed) and institutionally (how is the Administration institutionally structured) from other examples.
This study is expected to shed light on the construction industry –state nexus from this particular angle. The construction industry in Turkey has been believed to play important role in its GDP growth rates. Besides, the existing construction boom started to play a more prominent role in politics as we have witnessed with the AKP’s mega projects (e.g. Channel Istanbul) as well as the recent protest wave triggered by a shopping mall project on Gezi Park, on very last green spaces near Taksim square in Istanbul.
Samir Karnik Hinks
A "Tribune of the Oppressed": Positioning Claudia Jones' Leninism
This paper looks at the ways Claudia Jones synthesised her experiences as a black Trinidadian working class woman to move beyond the Stalinist orthodoxy of the CPUSA and develop a proto-‐intersectional analysis of the oppression of black women. The final section focuses upon Jones’ work organising the Caribbean diaspora in London through the anti-‐racist, anti-‐imperialist paper the West Indian Gazette. However, Claudia Jones remained a Leninist to the end of her life, and whilst the axis of her political praxis was fighting against oppression, this paper employs a “Leninist prism” to understand Jones thought. In doing so Jones can be seen as both a product of the Harlem Popular Front and internal debates of the CPUSA, but also an original and imaginative thinker who embodied the principle that Leninism should be a politics for the oppressed.
Nektarios Kastrinakis
The stillbirth of Communist Russia
The collapse of the Soviet Union is today one of the main reasons why the left has difficulty to threaten bourgeois ideological hegemony. One way to deal with this problem is to radically dissociate the Soviet Union from the communist program. This paper sets to investigate how far the claim that Soviet Union was a communist social formation is justified. We examine the first two formative decades of Soviet Union (1917-‐1938) and we argue that the revolution was already going amiss from its outset because of the social structure of Russia and the absence or failure of the revolutions in Europe.
On the political level, we take Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune in his “The Civil War in France” as his opinion about the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat and we compare it with the reality of revolutionary Russia. We argue that the specific social structure and historical conditions of the revolution in Russia, combined with Lenin’s theory about the organisation and nature of the revolutionary party, lead to a reduction of the dictatorship of the working class to a dictatorship of the party of the working class and then to a silencing of the democracy inside the party which had a debilitating effect on the course of the revolution.
On the economic level, we build on Paresh Chattopadhyay’s argument that capital was always at work in the Soviet Union despite claims to the contrary in east and west alike, and we argue that transformation of the social relations of production (workers’ control of the working place and of the economy) was never established.
Our sources are the works of the classics of Marxism (Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg) and later and more recent authors like Charles Bettelheim, Robert Vincent Daniels, Alec Nove and Paresh Chattopadhyay.
Paul Kellogg
For unity against war and capitalism – the half-‐remembered contribution of Leon Trotsky, 1914-‐1917
"It is one hundred years since socialism’s greatest crime. August 4 1914, the parliamentary caucus of the world’s then largest Marxist organization – the mass Social Democratic Party of Germany – voted to support financing Germany’s war effort. Most European socialist parties followed suit, sending their members into the horror of the trenches in what was to become the “Great War” of 1914-‐1918. Prominent among the small minority of socialists who stood firm against militarism, were two Russians – Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Each took a very strong anti-‐war position, but did so in quite different ways. Lenin’s positions are well-‐known – particularly his call for “revolutionary defeatism”. Trotsky’s quite distinct positions – in spite of his role as main author of the pivotal Zimmerwald manifesto – have largely faded from memory. This paper will argue, there is much in these half-‐forgotten positions that are relevant to socialist, anti-‐war activists in the 21st century, in some important ways more relevant than the positions adopted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The paper will survey three aspects of Trotsky’s anti-‐war work in this period: a) the positions he saw as central to the movement, in particular the adoption of the quite simple slogan “end the imperialist war” and the promotion of the call for the formation of a United States of Europe; b) his role as the main figure in a daily anti-‐war newspaper, Our Word (Nashe Slovo); and c) his orientation towards a group of internationalist, anti-‐war worker-‐militants in St. Petersburg, members of the Inter-‐District Committee or Mezhrayonka. The paper will then conclude with some reflections on why Trotsky’s distinct positions and activity have been only half-‐remembered in the decades since.
This paper flows from research being prepared for an edited collection reflecting on the politics and practice of the Mezhrayonka."
Sinead Kennedy
Disciplining the Precarious Body: Biopolitical regulation in an era of chronic crisis. "Stream: How capitalism survives? A Marxist-‐Feminist perspective.
We live in a time of the massification of insecurity – an insecurity that is, we are told, the necessary condition to escape from “crisis” and secure the future for a so-‐called ‘neoliberal’ global order. Yet, for large sections of the population this temporality of ‘crisis’ has been replaced with a crisis of ordinariness. What is termed “crisis” is now a defining fact of life as people’s lives become characterised as one of long-‐term wearing down and wearing out and where existence is increasing precarious. This precaritisation is characterised by the breaching of hygienic borders – political and territorial borders, the borders between the global north and south, as well as the borders of race, class and gender. Every aspect of social relations is now subjected to discipline and control not just through institutions but through the control of the processes of life itself. This paper will argue that repertoire of neoliberal strategies of subjectivation and governance are particularly explicit in the
treatment and representation of women under austerity. It will focus on exploring the construction of a neoliberal logic where some bodies become recognisable subjects, entitled to protection, while others are constructed as internal enemies and rendered disposable.
Sami Khatib
From Creative to Messianic Destruction: How a Zombies Dies
Capital is a purely social relation that valorizes itself while temporalizing its own historical time. The value of a commodity, as Marx put it, is defined by its substance which is itself a relation: abstract labor. The latter is produced through the employment of living labor. Value, however, is not just congealed or dead labor, but most of all undead labor. Within the spurious infinity of the ac-‐ and decelerating cycles of capital accumulation, dead labor is valorized and, always anew, survives its own death as undead labor. The undeadness of value as capital is not simply speculative or supra-‐sensuous; rather, it is also sensuous and violently destructive. What Schumpeter called “creative destruction” is not only an immanent necessity within the process of capital accumulation but also the eternal recurrence of capitalism’s Urszene, which Marx famously coined “original accumulation” (ursprüngliche Akkumulation). If capitalism’s modus vivendi is actually a modus moriendi, capitalism’s eternal resurrection has to always anew destroy earlier stages of capitalism and non-‐capitalist economies. Against this spurious infinity of creative destruction, Walter Benjamin proposed a different form of destruction – a certain non-‐violent or even messianic destruction, which could deposit the flawed dialectics of capitalist positions and negations. However, Benjamin’s peculiar constellation of messianic nihilism and historical materialism cannot be mapped from the perspective of the self-‐valorizing cycles of capitalist accumulation. Be it “divine violence,” the modern “barbarian,” or the “destructive character,” his theoretical figures of de-‐figuration propose an asymmetrical negation to both capitalist creation and capitalist destruction. Benjamin’s paradoxical strategy of accelerationist decelerationism – a lightning-‐fast pulling of the “emergency break” of the racing train of capitalist modernity – alludes to a new way of conceiving of the end of capitalism – to a communist strategy of survival which exceeds capitalism’s undeadness. In my paper I will discuss Benjamin’s messianic nihilism as an attempt to theorize a communist cessation of capitalism’s modus moriendi.
Seungman Kim
Two financial crises and neoliberal financialization in Korean welfare regime
Since the 1997 East Asian financial crisis, two competing claims on characteristics of Korean society have coexisted. On the one hand, Korean society was said to undergo a rapid shift into neoliberal financialization that gave rise to harmful effects on the society gradually. On the other hand, Korea was regarded as a country that has somewhat completed a transition to the welfare state. The latter opinion has received much stronger public supports since the
2008 financial crisis. As class struggles have been weakened since 1997, ‘citizen solidarity’ replaced class hostilities, and many liberals who were disguised as lefties have been trying to spread a discourse of the universal welfare state as its final goal. The purpose of this study is to criticize fundamental premises of Korean welfare state discourse. Neoliberal financialization can be compatible with a regime of universal welfare, which may establish a complementary relationship with the former because of their subordinated status of East Asian countries in global capital market. Among others, a giant public pension fund emerged as one of the most important financial agencies after the first financial crisis and formed a Korean Capital market by managing the huge financial assets. A discourse on the universal welfare regime in South Korea should be analyzed as a symptom of neoliberal financialization, not as its 'alternative'."
Jim Kincaid
Worries about the rate of profit
"Rightly, the rate of profit continues to be central in Marxist work on the world economy. But in much current research, rate of profit concepts and data are being used in too reductionist and mechanical a way. We cannot now make the assumption, as Marx usually did, that the profit rate equals the amount of surplus-‐value extracted from labour, divided by capital advanced. Huge quantities of surplus-‐value are drained from companies in the form of payments to executives. Even for declared profits, the official data sources on which Marxist research relies are failing to reflect increasing levels of corporate tax evasion, made easier by globalisation and the ready availability of tax havens. Also missed are profits made invisible because disguised as exaggerated estimates for tax-‐exempt depreciation.
The profitability of past investment is only one influence in current investment decisions. Corporate cash piles have been building up on a gigantic scale because the rate of realised profitability is in fact relatively high. It is the level of investment which lags – and this is of course, in part, because future profitability is expected to be lower or, at least, more uncertain. But cash piles are also accumulating because companies want a large war-‐chest of cash reserves to raise profits by playing the market in corporate control through mergers and acquisitions – or in order to fight off unwelcome raiders."
Stefan Kipfer & Parastou Saberi
Populism, Fascism and the Survival of Capitalism
Capitalism has repeatedly survived through fascism. In our current conjuncture, authoritarian populism and fascism have helped reorganize rule in various parts of the capitalist world. Recent elections from India to Europe have indicated the disturbing comeback of explicit forms of fascism. One complicated question in this context relates to subaltern support for the hard right. In our two contexts, Paris (France) and Toronto (Canada), recent electoral results (for Mayor Ford in Toronto and the Front National in Paris)
have spurred debates about the sources of right-‐wing electoral behaviour among both white and non-‐white fractions of the working class. Informed by Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre, Frantz Fanon, Himani Bannerji, and Gill Hart, our approach to the question of subaltern support for authoritarian politics is multifaceted. We emphasize the contingency of voting choices in relationship to the deeper -‐ and always contradictory -‐ terrains of everyday life. We suggest that spatialized public discourses (often reified by means of electoral maps) force us to deal with the relationship between electoral geographies, racialized socio-‐spatial restructuring and territorialized state intervention (notably in segregated working-‐class suburban spaces). We conclude that the contradictory realities of working class support for hard right populism have major implications for counter-‐colonial left political strategies, not least with respect to the national question in its various thorny forms.
Sebastian Klauke
forward a conception of social relations and an emphasis the centrality of power and class struggle for our account of history.
While most Marxists see themselves as heir to these two defining features of Marx, it is no secret that it has often been difficult to properly marry them. Political Marxism itself, we argue, has been caught within this contradictory legacy. As a result, what was once a promising historicist alternative became mired in economistic readings of capitalism which hinder the practice of historicisation it was supposed to buttress. This article seeks to make good on the initial promise of Political Marxist by radicalizing the agent-‐centered and historicist legacy of Marx."
Samuel Knafo
The Imperialism of Financialisation: Marxism and the Uneven History of Global Finance
This paper analyses the Marxist literature on financialisation and criticises its structuralist bias and its tendency to work on the basis of aggregates that obfuscate complex and diverse social relations. As I argue, this lens casts financialisation in largely asocial and de-‐contextualised ways which make it difficult to historicise this phenomenon and understand the power relations involved. As a challenge, this paper uses a Political Marxist framework to offer an alternative account based on agency. In particular, I ask, why has financialisation become such a generalised process? This very fact has generally been taken as a proof in itself of the need for a structural approach. For this seems to suggest a more structural driving force at work. To counter such pervasive narrative about financialisation, this paper traces the uneven development of financialisation from its American origins, its spread through Euromarkets and its impact on financial systems in Germany and Japan. It seeks in the process to reframe our understanding of the essential features of financialisation and provide the foundations for a 'social history' of its evolution.
Ece Kocabicak
How capitalism survives without women workers in Turkey
"Since the early decades of capitalist development, the composition of free wage-‐labour has always been entirely men in Turkey. Consequently, share of women in the non-‐agricultural sectors in Turkey is much lower than other countries. In order to investigate the reasons of women’s lower level of paid employment, I will provide a comparative analysis among the countries which level of capitalist development is same as Turkey, yet the share of women in the paid employment is much higher than Turkey.
The evidence that I have analysed thus far, suggests that in comparison to the selected sample of countries, the feminisation of free wage-‐labour in Turkey has delayed approximately by a half century. This situation has complicated implications on the proletarianisation process and capital accumulation. With this paper, my aim is to present
the initial outcomes of my data analysis with regard to the distinctive features of capitalist development in Turkey. These include the conditions of primitive accumulation, the composition of capital accumulation, sectoral distribution of free wage-‐labour, class struggle and the state. In doing so, I expect to contribute to the literature by demonstrating the mutually shaping relationship between patriarchy and capitalism."
ANGELOS KONTOGIANNIS-‐MANDROS
Neofascism in the era of crisis: The case of Golden Dawn
"In this paper we aim to illuminate the key factors that underlie Golden Dawn’s emergence as a major political force in the Greek political scene in the aftermath of the massive social mobilizations experienced in the country the period 2010-‐12 and in the context of the ongoing socio-‐economic crisis.
Our goal is to provide an in-‐depth analysis of the characteristics of the neofascist discourse, its influence in the broader political debate and its rather dialogical relation with the discourse and policies of the ‘mainstream’ right. This will enable us to proceed in a more sound examination of its electoral profile (i.e. sociodemographic characteristics of its voters) and its political dynamic.
The surprisingly high results of the party both in the euro-‐elections and the municipality and prefecture elections that preceded, despite the criminal prosecutions against its leadership, consists for us the ultimate proof that we are dealing here with a deep socio-‐political current of crucial significance for the understanding of the dynamics that currently interplay in the restructuring of the Greek party system. Furthermore it is our conviction that Golden Dawn’s rise consist a very interesting case for the examination of the political limits of contemporary neoliberal capitalism as part or outcome of the authoritarian transformation that complements the management of the economic crisis.
We hope that such an analysis will not only contribute to a more sound understanding of Greek politics but will be of importance for the examination of the emergence and outspread of radical right and neo-‐fascist currents though out the continent."
Paavo Kotiaho
Tales of Transformismo: International Human Rights Law and the Onslaught of Neoliberal Capitalism
Since the publication of Samuel Moyn’s 2010 ground-‐breaking study on the contemporary history of international human rights law -‐ The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History – scholarship on international human rights law and its history has been shaken. Rather than focusing on the age-‐old debate on the relationship of humanitarianism to human rights (Moyn: 2013), Moyn’s 2010 study has demanded a shift of focus that brings to light questions that touch directly on the contemporary era. Amongst these questions and lines
of inquiry the one that stands out in its significance for the 2014 Historical Materialism conference has been that which interrogates the relationship between the international human rights movement and neoliberalism. Yet, despite being alternatively seen as frère enemis (Moyn: 2013), historical companions (Wills: 2014) or competing sites of hegemonic contestation (Marks: 2012), contemporary accounts fail to consider the relationship systematically as one of mutual constitution existing within the same ensemble of social relations. To ameliorate this state of affairs this paper will argue that lessons ought to be learned from the research agenda of Antonio Gramsci in relation to the development of Italian capitalism of the 19th century. In particular, drawing on three historical vignettes (the 1970s rise of the human rights movement in the Southern Cone, the 1980s incorporation of human rights with structural adjustment programs, and the late 1980s turn by the World Bank to the ‘social’) this paper will suggest that the concept of transformismo which Gramsci invoked to describe the tactic of co-‐optation, pacification and eventual decapitation of progressive tendencies by the powers that be, provides a particularly apt theoretical tool to explain the tendencies within international human rights law that propagated from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. And in so doing, this paper hopes to contribute to the general thematic of the conference and suggest ways in which transformative forces may consider interacting with human rights while at the same time avoiding such engagement’s co-‐optive potential.
Despina Koutsoumba & Panagiotis Sotiris
Creating laboratories of hope: rethinking the question of organization today
During the past few years, the question of organization has returned both in positive and negative terms. The experience of impressive mass protest movements, based upon forms of direct democracy, horizontal coordination, equal voicing, along with their inability to be ‘translated’ into political movements and dynamics has opened up the great debates upon organization, either towards a direction of a refusal of party form or to the direction of a rethinking of the party form as connection between movements. At the same time the various expressions of a crisis of the anticapitalist Left, at least in some of its variants, not only in the sense of its politics but also in the sense of its organizational culture, have brought again forward the importance of the question of organization. The same goes for the contradictory results of various attempts at creating broad left electoral fronts. To answer all these challenges we need a profound rethinking of the question of organization, by going back to Gramsci’s conception of the party as elaborator and laboratory of programs, strategies and political intellectualities but also to the ‘gnoseology of politics’ inherent in the leninist project. To these we also need to add the strategic importance of the United Front, as a means to facilitate the encounter of different experiences, histories of struggles, political traditions, and sensitivities and also to transform the experiences coming from the movement into political strategy. Consequently, instead of traditional forms of
it would be, on the whole, a very considerable improvement of our condition.” One question for the century ahead is whether socialists can arrive at the same conclusion by different means, proper to our tradition and consistent with the times.
Silvia L. López
Brazil: Development as Counterinsurgency in the New World Order
Paulo Arantes, the premier Marxist philosopher of Brazil, provides us in his most recent book "O Novo Tempo do Mundo" (2014) with a new understanding of social development as a form of counterinsurgency and as a technology of security deployed by the state in this new phase of Brazilian capitalism. Arantes contends that Brazil lives in a permanent state of civil war where power reconfigures itself only to give orders about its state of exception. How do we make sense of this new order of the capitalist world in Brazil? Is the "emergent" in economic powers inevitably linked to the "emergency" the state invokes to rule in a permanent state of exception? I will analyze this and other key ideas of Paulo Arantes for an Anglophone audience, who has not had access to his work before.
Ishay Landa
Capitalism, History, and Progress: Marxist Perspectives Re-‐examined
In this talk I wish to tackle the historical question of capitalism’s resilience by returning to the fundamental concept of ‘progress.’ The prospects of socialist strategy in our times (continue to) depend to a large extent on the way progress is appreciated. Different understanding of progress entail different strategic resolutions: a fatalistic belief in progress as an unstoppable development – a belief which is today largely extinct – entails a reformist politics, leading to post-‐capitalism; historical pessimism and disillusion, on the other hand, bring forth either resignation or a desperate, sometimes messianic search for loopholes that will allow an escape from a nearly inevitable doom. A third approach, which I deem more properly dialectical and in tune with Marxist thought, vigorously defends progress but only as a possibility. Here, progress is seen as both immanent to capitalist history and at the same time as only potential, facing enormous obstacles and powerful enemies. If progress is to be enacted, revolutionary transformation will be essential but not as some voluntaristic gesture. Rather, revolutionary political action is called upon to activate and fulfill the real contradictions and potentialities which capitalist history itself both harbors and frustrates. These ideas will be discussed with reference to key questions associated with the idea of progress – material civilization, technological advance, or the historical significance of fascism – and to several seminal interpretations of history and progress, as propounded by such authors as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and … J. R. R. Tolkien.
in the 1930s, the problem of representation continues to have political and strategic consequences. Rooted as it is in a rigorous analysis of capitalism, whatever form it takes, the Brechtian method of representation still has much to teach us."
Nick Lawrence
Uneven and Combined Development: Commodity Survival and the Colonized Everyday in Postwar Critical Theory
Writing in 1961 toward the close of the second volume of his sociological study of _la vie quotidienne_, Henri Lefebvre makes emphatic his assertion that “critique of everyday life generalizes [the] experience of the ‘backward’ or ‘underdeveloped’ nations and extends it to the everyday in the highly developed industrial countries.” In adapting Trotsky’s terminology of uneven and combined development to the situation of colonized lifeworlds in core and periphery alike, Lefebvre points up the pressures, evacuations and asymmetries of the concept of the everyday at the moment when it achieves definition as a focused object of analysis. This paper examines the stress tests put to the ‘everyday’ as both frontline and back-‐formation of capital’s advance into hitherto unoccupied territory, primarily in the work of Lefebvre, but also of Adorno, Debord and such Marxist-‐feminists as Silvia Federici, Selma James and Mariarosa Dallacosta. Addressing related problems of work and leisure, the division of labour and the question of social reproduction, these thinkers grapple above all with the logic of capital’s simultaneous production of homogeneity and inequality as this logic pertains to the commodification of everyday life. It is in and through the colonization of the everyday, their analyses suggest, that the commodity-‐form extends its reach.
Athanasios Lazarou
The Event in Architecture: Space as Concrete Abstraction in Eurozone-‐crisis Athens
"At the height of the Eurozone crisis in 2011 protestors scaled the Acropolis to place a banner against the Greek government’s austerity policies. Presented in full view to the rooftop café of Greece’s most prominent Eurozone project – Bernard Tschumi’s New Acropolis Museum – the demonstration highlighted the visible role of architecture in facilitating events during the political crisis. This paper engages the dialogue between these monumental architectural objects as products of the contradictions of capitalism expressed during a crisis; where changes in spatial syntax conceive themselves through temporary or semi-‐permanent interventions under the conditions of event.
Expanding upon spatial dialectics, the paper presents architecture as both subject and object of its own historical transformation. To resolve the antithetical position of the two terms subject and object, the paper employs Henri Lefebvre’s notion of space as concrete abstraction to demonstrate that as capitalism comes under crisis, events can be understood as systems of measurement for spatial registrations of change and the re-‐organisation of
spatial relations. Critically, the event is being propositioned from the philosophical principle of a 'break' to question the link between theory and built forms regarding architectural outputs against ideological outputs."
Paul LeBlanc
Class consciousness, Labour-‐radical sub-‐culture, and revolutionary strategy
The truism “without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement” poses a challenge for activists in the tradition of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky. All too often such activists fetishize the ideas of these revolutionary heroes without being able to connect them to the material realities and practical struggles of our own time. Their relevance in twenty-‐first century contexts requires the development of concepts that can guide practical efforts in the face of new realities. Notions developed by cultural anthropologists intersect with Marxist theorizations to suggest the analytical concept of “radical labor subculture.” This will be illustrated by reference to U.S. labor history. The actuality of this radical labor subculture was essential in the development of radical class-‐consciousness within the U.S. working class, and sheds light on the growth of the powerful and influential left-‐wing currents within the mainstream of the U.S. labor movement from the 1860s through the 1930s. Political, economic, social, and cultural transformations stretching from the 1940s through the 1960s resulted in the erosion and decline of that subculture, with a consequent disconnect of left-‐wing radicalism from the working class. Political, social and economic transformations since the 1970s have generated cultural shifts and openings that appear to be feeding into the re-‐creation of a new radical labor subculture. A blending of such insights with the classical Marxist strategic orientation may provide a path forward for the creation of a mass movement capable of challenging capitalism.
Tobin LeBlanc Haley
Pathologizing Mad Women: A feminist political economy analysis of the role of biopsychiatry in the neoliberal age
"Effects of neoliberal policy trends for mad women are erased through the mobilization of bio-‐psychiatry. Marxist scholarship documents the symbiotic relationship between biopsychiatry and neoliberalism (e.g. Cohen 2014). Yet there is an absence of scholarship on the regulation of the gender order by biopsychiatry. Critiques of the role of biopsychiatry in stabilizing a (gendered) social order necessary to capitalism were popular in the last century (Busfield 1986, 1996, D’Uren 1997). Recently, these critiques have waned despite the strengthening of the biomedical model of health under neoliberalism (Raphael & Curry-‐Stevens 2009).
This paper explores how gendered neoliberal trends are enacted and how the effects are neutralized in the lives of mad women through the mobilization of bio-‐psychiatry. This paper uses archival and documentary research and data from interviews with mad people
living in high-‐support homes in Ontario. Feminist political economy scholarship, especially work on social reproduction (e.g. Bezanson and Luxton 2006), provides a framework for analyzing how neoliberal trends in labour and social policy deepen mad women’s inequality while biopsychiatry attributes inequality to individual pathology. Applying these insights to the situation of mad women in Ontario’s high-‐support homes demonstrates the role of biopsychiatry in maintaining the gendered social order of neoliberalism."
Taek-‐Gwang Lee
The Natural Ontology of Commodification: How Could Commodity Be Our Own Identity?
The aim of my presentation is to analyze the relationship between the logic of commodity form and subjectivity. Marx’s conceptualization of fetishism was an attempt to understand the effect of commodity form producing the formal equality. The problem of commodity form is the fetishism of the equal exchanges by which everything is simply transformed into an equalized value whatever its substantive differences in use value. Lukcas developed further the theory of reification from Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism and defined its essential aspect as the ghostly objectivity of commodity form. Recounting Marxist theorization of commodification, I would like to focus on how commodity form reinforces the fetishistic status of subjectivity through consumerism. Most of critical approach to consumerism has seemed to shed light on the immorality of market-‐centered economic system or the pleasure principle of consumers ignorant to the cruelty of capitalism. From this perspective, I will critically consider Evgeny Pashukanis’ theory of the relation between commodity form and legal system. The limit of his theory is undeniable in understanding the procedure of the subjectivation, but still insightful for theorizing the natural ontology of commodities. My contention is that the logic of commodity form is closely related to the legalization of political economy in capitalism and the normalization of “the truth of a market” for everyday life. Pashukanis claims, “all law was inherently related to the commodity exchange relationship which reaches its highest point under capitalism” (Michael Head, 2008). I think his understanding of the legal form is useful to delve into the secret of commodity form, which naturalizes capitalism.
Emanuele Leonardi
Carbon Trading Dogma: Financial Dimensions and Political Implications of Global Carbon Markets
"The paper presents two interrelated sections. In the first, global carbon markets are historically contextualized, analytically described and politically articulated against the background of a twofold hypothesis: a) the process of progressive marketization of climate change occurs in connection with the emergence of a new modality of value production (which can be generically defined as 'cognitive capitalism'); b) the governance of contemporary circuits of valorization tends to be located within the financial sphere and
poses a constitutive and ongoing uncertainty/instability as a necessary condition for their reproduction.
Such a twofold hypothesis is tested in the second part of the paper, with specific reference to the Clean Development Mechanism – as established by the Kyoto Protocol. In particular, the analysis will focus on the carbon commodities enacted by the Protocol, which is to say the Certified Emission Reductions. The argument advanced by the paper is twofold: a) such commodities depend on an instrumental use of theoretical innovation ceaselessly produced by climate science; b) the wealth creation activated by these commodities almost entirely occurs within the space defined by financial markets.
Overall, the paper aims at demonstrating how the value produced in global carbon markets exclusively rests on the social actors' arbitrary acceptance of the carbon trading dogma, namely the assertion – empirically inconsistent as much as impossible to be accounted for – that only market agents can efficiently tackle the critical issues raised by global warming.
Holly Lewis
The Problem of Experience in Marxist and Feminist Epistemologies
"This paper addresses the Western feminist and poststructuralist critique of classical Marxism's reliance on objective knowledge for political assessment. Feminism claims that Marxism's rational objectivity (considered 'masculinist' in itself) elides the lived experience of political subjects resulting in organizational conclusions that ignore differences and contingencies. Feminist standpoint epistemology pins knowledge to experience and perspective. While rationality is still suspect for poststructuralist (i.e. queer theoretical, intersectional) epistemology, it goes further, even critiquing standpoint epistemology for appealing to a stable political subject possessing agency. Both routinely charge Marxists with epistemological overreach since Marxists draw analyses from economic processes rather than from comparing aspects of intersectional subjectivities.
But, contrary to this critique, Marxists don't only draw information from mathematical accounts and historical laws: Marxists also maintain that knowledge is produced from a ruling class standpoint, that the working-‐class life engages in sensuous activity, and that emancipatory politics depend on the capacity of self-‐aware agents situated at myriad cultural/gendered intersections to not only achieve solidarity but to make collective decisions in the pursuit of 'losing their chains'.
I intend to develop Marxist-‐feminist epistemological methods that navigate the poles of universal and particular by synthesizing the more useful feminist and queer theoretical critiques of Marxist epistemological habits in order to assess their potential impact on current Marxist (particularly Leninist) organizing practices."
Sophie Lewis
Eco-‐Marxisms: beyond the "unproduced" nature
The analytic framework of metabolic rift contains ongoing promise for the social sciences, particularly insofar as it can be expanded to include social-‐reproductive aspects of life on earth. This influential and persistent form of Marxist political ecology pioneered by John Bellamy Foster now confronts imperatives to broaden, hybridize and radicalize. Identifying the conceptual freight of limits, irreversible change, and ‘waste’ Foster attaches to the metaphor of ‘universal metabolic rift’, I survey Foster’s oeuvre with an eye to dualist inconsistencies in his handling of the socio-‐natural relations of labour production. I argue that his ultimately limits-‐centred framing of capitalist ecology, while made in a traditional humanist mode, actually leaves humans out of the picture in their capacity, not as capitalists or workers, but as (also finite) natural resources. Concomitant under-‐emphasis on the ‘work’ of nature obscures the material and epistemic inseparability of capital and nature under current conditions; while simultaneously de-‐animating the webs of life declared in Marx’s Ecology (2000) to be metabolically lively. This methodological lapse between stated holism and an applied recourse to ‘external’ nature, although an all-‐too familiar one in nature-‐theoretic scholarship, persists in limiting the ambition of eco-‐revolutionary politics. This problem presents obstacles for evolving a truly ‘co-‐productive’ political account of alternate, non-‐capitalist ecologies. Symptomatic is the absence of a developed ‘social reproduction’ lens, for Foster, which ultimately limits his ability to transcend the ideology of “unproduced” nature.
Lars Lih
“Inescapable Torments”: Bukharin’s Vision of the Russian Revolution
In early 1920, Bukharin published a 160-‐page treatise entitled Economy of the Transition Period. This small book is Bukharin’s magnum opus as a Marxist theoretician. Unfortunately, it has acquired a very misleading reputation as an expression of the illusions alleged to be part of so-‐called “war communism”—illusions that supposedly were rejected within a year with the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in spring 1921. One reason for this persistent misreading is the book’s very idiosyncratic style. Essentially Bukharin created his own mix of Marxist jargon, sociological jargon, and jargon especially coined for the occasion. Far from depicting a leap into communism, the book focuses on the titanic economic breakdown in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Bukharin in no way evades the massive dimensions of the economic crisis, but strives to present it as the inevitable result of a profound popular revolution. The Bolshevik Party is thus an essentially constructive force, striving to reconstitute a minimal equilibrium. In making his case, Bukharin gives an account of the major economic policies of the new Soviet government. As a result, the book is probably the most comprehensive defense of Bolshevik policy by a major party spokesman.
Starting with a review of several key debates within the Brazilian social sciences (which Schwarz has been engaging with since his formative years), several of his early interventions will be re-‐examined. In doing so, I will emphasize how Schwarz’s theories are solutions to the aporia resulting from the application of dominant theoretical models to “peripheral” countries such as Brazil. Returning to the (largely) heterodox and neo-‐Marxian debates on historiography and capitalist development within Brazil is essential for understanding both the larger significance of notions like the “misplaced idea” and the manner in which Schwarz pioneered a cultural sociology in the manner of Theodor Adorno (one of Schwarz’s early mentors). The innovative aspects examined in the early essays on culture and aesthetic theory anticipate the later turn to value theory in the early 1990’s, culminating in Schwarz’s influential essay on Robert Kurz’s 1991 book, The Collapse of Modernization. I hope to show how Schwarz’s engagement with Kurz marks a fundamental shift within his theoretical framework as a whole; specifically, in his move away from viewing Brazil’s paradoxical modernity through the lens of dependency-‐theory, toward the critique of modernization outlined in Kurz’s text. It will become clear in the process how much of Schwarz’s recent work has been concerned with grasping how Brazil’s recent history— as well as the “Brazilian” affects and experiences condensed in its cultural objects— are also moments in the history of capital’s larger, contradictory dynamics and developments. The task will not be intervening into intellectual history for its own sake, so much as distilling the significance and implications of “social process” as developed within the critical writings of Roberto Schwarz."
Ottokar Luban
Ottokar Luban:Left German Social Democrats against the Great War
"In case of an outbreak of war a unanimously approved resolution of the International Socialist Congress of 1907 obliged the socialist parties “to intervene in favor of its speedy termination, and to do all in their power to utilize the economic and political crisis caused by the war to rouse the people and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.” While the majority of the German Social Democratic leadership and of its Reichstag group gave up its oppositional politics and supported the war efforts of the imperial government a little group around Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring -‐ due to the resolution of the Socialist International -‐ tried to win the party back for an antimilitaristic policy. Slowly this tiny minority was joined by more and more other militants in the party. Finally this growing minority was kicked off the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and was forced to found an own party the Independent Party of Germany (USPD) in April 1917.
The paper will show the efforts of the left socialists (Spartacus Group, Bremen Left Radicals, Revolutionary Shop Stewards, and left Centrists) in the inner party struggles for an offensive anti war policy (August 1914-‐April 1917) and their clandestine activities to initiate mass actions for peace and democracy (Bread Strike in April 1917, Mass Strike of the Ammunition
Workers in January 1919, the Uprising in Berlin on November 9th 1919). I will emphasize the special social, economic, mental and political conditions of the late German Empire in war time hindering or supporting the development towards revolutionary mass movements.
In case of an outbreak of war a unanimously approved resolution of the International Socialist Congress of 1907 obliged the socialist parties “to intervene in favor of its speedy termination, and to do all in their power to utilize the economic and political crisis caused by the war to rouse the people and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.” While the majority of the German Social Democratic leadership and of its Reichstag group gave up its oppositional politics and supported the war efforts of the imperial government a little group around Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring -‐ due to the resolution of the Socialist International -‐ tried to win the party back for an antimilitaristic policy. Slowly this tiny minority was joined by more and more other militants in the party. Finally this growing minority was kicked off the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and was forced to found an own party the Independent Party of Germany (USPD) in April 1917.
The paper will show the efforts of the left socialists (Spartacus Group, Bremen Left Radicals, Revolutionary Shop Stewards, and left Centrists) in the inner party struggles for an offensive anti war policy (August 1914-‐April 1917) and their clandestine activities to initiate mass actions for peace and democracy (Bread Strike in April 1917, Mass Strike of the Ammunition Workers in January 1919, the Uprising in Berlin on November 9th 1919). I will emphasize the special social, economic, mental and political conditions of the late German Empire in war time time (especially the hard suppression by the military and police authorities, the immense war propaganda in 99 % of the media, the more and more increasing food shortage) hindering or supporting the development towards revolutionary mass movements."
Lutz Luithlen
Marx and crises in capitalism
The aim of this paper is to show that Marx’s writings on economic crises in Capital are still relevant and instructive. The paper starts with an introduction to the dynamics of capitalist crises as rooted in the inherent contradictions of capitalist development. It then sets out the major events during the build-‐up to the financial (sub-‐prime) crisis between 2000 and 2010 and invites Marx to comment on both events and circumstances to be followed by an investigation into Marx’s own categories of interest-‐bearing capital in the light of the ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ that fuelled the debt-‐laden investment boom. Finally, the question of the relative detachment of the financial system from its bedrock of production will be addressed. The conclusion is that, although Marx could not have anticipated the particular form of modern financial instruments, the strategies, excesses and trickeries of modern finance can be read off his script.
David Mabb
A Romance in Fourteen Parts.
"In A Romance in Fourteen Parts, a copy of El Lissitzky’s About Two Squares – A Suprematist Story from 1920-‐22 will be painted onto facsimile pages of William Morris’ Kelmscott Press edition of Wood beyond the World from 1892.
Lissitzky’s About Two Squares is a short picture book for children that experiments with typography, image and narrative to tells the story of two squares, one red, one black, which travel to earth from outer space and transform the world. Each Lissitzky image will be painted over pages from William Morris’ Wood beyond the World in facsimile from the Kelmscott Press edition which Morris founded and worked on as a typographer and designer. In Morris’ romance the hero sets out on a sea voyage anxious to see and learn more of the outside world, eventually winning for himself the kingdom of Stark-‐Wall and the love of a beautiful maiden. They then live happily ever after.
In A Romance in Fourteen Parts, the publications will cease to be separate objects that can be held and digested. Instead they will be constructed into a fourteen-‐part installation. The books will become ‘interwoven’: parts of the Wood beyond the World will be left unpainted to disrupt the geometric Lissitzky designs. A dialogue between Lissitzky’s revolutionary narrative and Morris’ late romance will be created. The two will be simultaneously frozen but never fixed, unable to fully merge or separate, unable to transform the world or live happily ever after."
Mike Macnair & Ben Lewis
From the Anti-‐Imperialist Left to the Social-‐Chauvinist Right: the Die Glocke group and the theory of imperialism
"100 years on from the outbreak of World War I, this presentation will contend that the ideas of the German social chauvinists are worth revisiting, interrogating and understanding. Obviously this will be because German nationalism and social imperialism are ways forward for our movement today, but because the transformation of some of those around Parvus’s social-‐chauvinist publication, Die Glocke, from staunchly anti-‐imperialist ‘lefts’ in the pre-‐war SPD to some of the biggest cheerleaders of a German victory during that horrific war raises a number of important and interesting questions: not least regarding the Marxist theory of imperialism and its development within the Second International.
How could it come to pass that politicians such as Konrad Haenisch, Paul Lensch and Parvus -‐ once all champions of the anti-‐imperialist ‘left’ of the SPD -‐ could embrace the August 4 vote for war credits and ‘war socialism’ and even on occasion see this position as a continuation of their pre-‐1914 ‘anti-‐imperialist’ politics? How were concrete assessments of
the political situation and the global powers involved in WWI transformed into an overarching theory of imperialism and ‘world policy’? How were the categories of Marxism deployed to justify such positions? What are the continuities and discontinuities between the positions adopted by this group in the pre-‐war congresses of the SPD and those during WWI?
Based on recent research and translation work conducted with Ben Lewis, this paper will explore these questions. It will analyse the group’s understanding of imperialism and war against the backdrop of the extensive debates in the Second International, seeking to draw out the implications of these controversies for thinking about imperialism and anti-‐imperialism today."
Ewa Majewska
Capitalism in semi-‐peripheries. Errors, failures or back side of success?
In my presentation I would like to focus on capitalism's survival within its peripheral investments showing, how what could be seen as a series of mistakes and failures in a liberal narrative preoccupied with political institutions proves to be a field of excellency in terms of political economy with its preoccupation with the accumulation of capital, wild exploitation and alienating ideological structures. Eastern Europe, and Poland specifically, is a perfect example of the phenomenon of the semi-peripheriality as it was depicted by Immanuel Wallerstein. I would like to show, how the current precarious lives of the new capitalist state has been perpetuated as what was called "immaturity" (Buden, Ost) and gender inequality (Federici, Dunn) and to see how resistance can still be seen and accelerated.
In order to discuss the semi-peripheriality and its peculiar forms of political agency, which can be seen as failures or infancy but also often present themselves as resistance and alternatives to the profit-orientation, I would like to look into Walter Benjamin’s essay on the work of art in the times of reproductibility. I think that just like the cinema in the 1930’s, also the semi-peripheries of today can and often do show their potential for disagreement and change. A redefinition of the semi-peripheries, which would escape the patronizing, colonial simplifications, could provide tools and critiques necessary for resistance, could make the persistance of capitalism weaker. The discussions of modernity and modernisation should not ignore the feminist and decolonial analysis of the production of women/other and they could – instead of a “chasing Europe” set of mimetic practices, try to see in the semi-peripheries agents of change also in a non, or better – counter-neoliberal sense.
Nivedita Majumdar
Class, Culture and Postcoloniality
The recent economic crisis showed yet again that class contradictions remain as central to our current economic moment they were in the pages of Marx’s Capital. The system's smooth functioning relies on an obfuscation of the role of class both by the state and in civic institutions and culture. Academia in general, and culture studies, in particular, participates in the undermining of class politics. David Harvey notes that in academia, the “broad adhesion to postmodern and post-‐structuralist ideas which celebrate the particular at the expense of big picture” participate in a similar obfuscation of class contradictions. A key claim that is made is that universal categories like class are incompatible with a nuanced appreciation of everyday culture. I discuss the marginalization of the category of class in postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory emerged, in crucial ways, as a discourse that defined itself in opposition to Marxism. It privileges the marginalized elements of social structures; thus its emphasis on the study of the local or the "fragment." Conversely, postcolonial theory is characterized by its rejection of the idea of human nature, by questioning the concept of human rights, and by its demotion of class to a peripheral status. Through analyses of industrial strikes and social movements in India and the UK, I question the posited binary between the structural and the experiential. Contrary to the basic assumptions of postcolonial theory, I argue that universal categories like class are compatible with a nuanced appreciation of everyday culture.
Andreas Malm
Steamroll all the brutes: Fossil energy and British imperialism in the nineteenth century
"Poor people in the peripheries of the world-‐economy suffer most from global warming. This has lead some to suggest that rich nations have amassed a ‘climate debt’ by engaging in fossil fuel-‐based development, the by-‐products of which now fall from the sky onto the poor, who have reaped none of the benefits. Others retort that two centuries of such development have in fact created the opportunities for everyone to leap into modernity – witness China and India, or even countries such as Nigeria and Egypt – and so the advanced economies should be thanked for their services, or at least walk free from any special duties to slash emissions or compensate victims. In the annually recurring clashes between rich and poor nations over the sharing of climate burdens, history is never far from view – but it is rarely explored in any depth. How did the fossil economy first reach the shores of the peripheries? What happened when the English tradition of coal combustion spread to other parts of the world? What did fossil fuel-‐based development really mean for those on the receiving end of steamboats and railroads, coalmines and cotton spinning machines?
Until the first Anglo-‐Burmese war in 1824, the British maritime empire had been sailing with the whims of the wind. Dependency on sail locked it in a near military balance with some of its peripheral adversaries, severely restricting the reach of British trade: unable to penetrate rivers upstream, merchants were often relegated to the coastal margins of potentially vast
markets at the mercy of domestic rulers, the factories at Canton being the archetypal example. The rise of the steamboat in imperial warfare changed all this. By relying on coal – an energy source oblivious to weather and landscape – the British Empire could use waterways to break into the interior of continents and smash resistance from fleets and armies incapable of withstanding the novel force. In China, the steamboats forced their way up to Nanking and opened the Celestial Empire for trade; in India, natives were herded into coalmines to extract the fuels for the boats, the much faster to ship out wealth from the colony; in Nigeria, armed crews drove inland to seize control over the production of palm oil – a crucial lubricant for steam-‐engines and other machines – and defeat tribal guerrillas; in Egypt, Muhammed Ali’s experiment in industrial modernisation was shattered by the grenades from coal-‐fired warships.
By exploring the role of fossil energy on some of the frontiers of imperial expansion in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, this paper will seek to radicalise the notion of ‘climate debt’. When a drought becomes permanent or the sea submerges a delta, it is not the first time people in the peripheries suffer the consequences of fossil fuel combustion, nor is such ‘development’ a train to modernity that has merely passed them by. They were run over from day one: fossil energy an indispensible source of power for the appropriation of resources from the peripheries, the history of the imperialist world-‐order is written in letters of coal and fire. On a global scale, the longue durée of the fossil economy begins with the devastation of Akka by British steamboats in 1840 and continues in the next extreme weather event to ravage communities and set back development by several decades in the Philippines or Haiti. The political purpose of such a historiography is, of course, to fan the flames of climate militancy in the peripheries; the theoretical resources for it, drawn on in this paper, are Rosa Luxemburg’s theories of imperialism, Ernest Mandel’s sketches on the role of energy in the long waves of capitalist development, and the debates between political Marxism and world-‐systems theory.
Grant Mandarino
“One of the very few true originals of our time”: Reviving Eduard Fuchs
"Outside of Walter Benjamin’s 1937 article “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” commissioned by Max Horkheimer for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the life and works of Eduard Fuchs (1870-‐1940) remain little known among Marxist cultural historians and theorists. Fuchs was a key player on the German left his entire life, from joining the outlawed Sozialistiche Arbeiterpartei in his hometown of Stuttgart as a journeyman printer in 1886 to his decisive role in the formation of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands in 1918-‐1919 and subsequent activity in the Right Opposition after 1928. His time as editor of the popular satirical newspaper Suddeutsche Postillon and publication of numerous illustrated histories of satirical and erotic imagery brought him notoriety, a substantial amount of money, and multiple prison sentences. The artist George Grosz, who met Fuchs for the first time in the early 1920s, later described him as “one of the very few true
originals of our time,” yet he is today remembered, if at all, as a collector of objets d’art and a somewhat naïve historian of social mores. This is largely the result of Benjamin’s assessment of Fuchs, which, as Frederic J. Schwartz has argued, is less about Fuchs himself and more about the methods he employs in his various writings, in Benjamin’s view wholly representative of the cruder aspects of historical materialism as theorized by reformist Social Democrats. More recent studies, such as Ulrich Weitz’s Eduard Fuchs: Der Mann im Schatten (2014), take the opposite view, placing Fuchs at the center of Weimar’s left-‐wing milieu as a uniquely charismatic individual whose historical significance is not reducible to broader structures of thought. Weitz succeeds in presenting a more favorable view of Fuchs as a person, but fails to show why we should care about Fuchs as a cultural historian.
While a revival of interest in Fuchs is to be welcomed, especially outside of Germany, the question remains: how should one engage his work? My paper takes up this question by reassessing Benjamin’s evaluation of Fuchs’ art historical methods, playing particular attention to the histories of caricature Fuchs’ published and how these studies influenced the practice and interpretation of satirical imagery within the Communist milieu during the Weimar period."
Jaleh Mansoor
Santiago Sierra: The Biopolitics of Abstraction
"This paper explores the lacunae between theories of “bare life” on the one hand and debates around histories of capitalist accumulation and subsumption on the other through a case studies of the work of controversial Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s practice, a cultural mediation that locates key shifts in political economy in Europe and the United States in an era of globalization and migration. This paper thus asks the following questions: How can Marxist theory be transformed to integrate an understanding of corporeality, identity, and subjectivity in its analysis of capitalism and class politics?
Much of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s practice addresses the fundamental violence inscribed in the wage relation, in which surplus value necessary to the expansion of capital is extracted through labor and compensated in a self reproducing matrix of remuneration reticulated to time in which the worker works against her own interest. A 2004 piece entitled 584 Horas de Trabajo (584 Hours of Work) sets the problem of labor against the art “work” in a retort to the legacy of minimalist sculpture, one of the last traditional artistic idioms of the 20th Century. By documenting the man-‐hours spent constructing a massive cubic monument mimicking those of Tony Smith, Richard Serra, and Carl Andre emblazoned on the side, Sierra undermines the myth of any solidarity between minimalism and labor, a false solidarity that has underscored the canonization of American minimalists in accounts such as Art Workers (2011). At the same time, Sierra explores the ways in which the imposition of the wage is compounded by constraints imposed by the state: citizenship, il/legality, immigration.
The double bind of the state-‐to-‐market relation which binds the wage against illegal forms of survival and thereby enforced it is Sierra’s project’s primary problem-‐set. In June 2001, Sierra collected 133 persons to take part in his project for the Spanish Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale. Sierra’s “action,” which took place on the opening day of this auspicious art world event, entailed his directing the men to an area in the Arsenale where he bleached all 133 persons’ hair, producing a visibly artificial appearance, in effect marking each person as though with a yellow highlighter. The delimiting criteria in selecting 133 men were as follows: they were to originate from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East and have dark hair. The participants had to be immigrants and refugees, legal or otherwise. The role of the artist in turn was to manage, direct, and process these persons. The yellow headed 133 then dispersed, returning to their everyday activities: predominantly illegal street vending on and around Piazza San Marco.
In the preoccupation with law and exception that has prevailed in much critical discourse on culture over the last decade (see Demos’s The Migrant Image), the reciprocal necessity of both optics (Marxian theories of the wage, and of subsumption) has fallen out of the picture. Insofar as capital totalizes by forms of separation and re-‐constitution of social relations, the mutually entwinement of law and wage become all the more urgent an object of analysis. It might be argued that the organization of surplus labor pools readies for fresh rounds of resource extraction and primitive accumulation is enabled only by laws of passage, of the regulation of boundaries and borders. This is globalization. Likewise, the “state of exception,” about which we have heard maybe too often, is a structuring principle for wage relations under threat, under duress of right to “live or let die.” Besides simply and tendentiously dismissing it as part of the symptomatic cruelty of the art world as transparent analog of capital in general, why is it that we see so many art projects addressing the crossroads of immigrant labor pools?"
Josep Maria Antentas
Anti-‐austerity protest, regime crisis and political strategy in the Spanish State
"The emergence of M15 movement in Spain in 15th May 2011 marked a turning point in Spanish politics. It was the biggest social upsurge since the establishment of the current Regime in 1978 and the beginning of mass resistance to austerity policies after a period in which resistance to social cuts was relatively small although real. The movement expressed a vague “antisystemic” consciousness targeting financial powers and political institutions. Soon after its emergence M15 as such vanished, but mutated into a wide range of different initiatives and movements. Since the first push of May and June 2011 anti-‐austerity protests have had a less visible existence, experienced fragmentation and dispersion, although some relevant episodes of social unrest have taken place. The overall dynamic of resistance to austerity since may 15th has been very defensive, with few political and concrete victories, but with elements of counter-‐ofensive and capability of disruption.
ii) The consolidation and peak of the expansive long wave of capitalist accumulation (1946-‐1968), characterized by its elevated profitability and the vigorous process of capital accumulation, with the private capitalist investment being now the main driver of the process.
iii) The falling rate of profit implied the collapse of private investment and the structural crisis of profitability (1969-‐1982). A relatively strong accumulation process was extended by the anti-‐cyclical policies and the government involvement in the economy.
iv) The neoliberal restructuring process (from 1983 onwards) implied a complete abandonment of the government intervention in the process of capital accumulation. There has been an important recovery of the general rate of profit that was not followed by a similar recovery in the rate of productive investment given the neoliberal bias of the economy towards labor-‐intensive industries and the financialisation."
Helena Marroig Barreto
Marini yesterday and today: highlights on the marxist theory of dependency and new perspectives
The aim of the this study is to introduce the basis of the work of Ruy Mauro Marini, a brasilian autor from the 60's, through his central categories such as dependency, subordinated insertion, and superexploitation of the work force. Also, the study intends to show some concepts presented by the critically renewed marxist theory of dependency, especially regarding the pattern of capital accumulation, already introduced by Marini. By that, this work hopes to be able to provide tools to operate an analysis of the current situation in Latin America, demystifying the conventional diagnosis on the matter, and revealing that the underdevelopment is still reproduced, and amplified, in the continent.
Wiktor Marzec
Marxism as a subjectifying device. Remarks form the empirical inquiry into the mobilizing power of Marxism
"The stubborn survival of capitalism redirected the focus of Marxist scholars into the past. The histories of borderland Marxisms, successful labour hegemonies and even Bolshevik politics are searched for new insights into contemporary struggles. However, this scholarship tirelessly retains a bias towards theoretical debates, remaining the vernacular Marxisms of workers underresearched.
Drawing from extensive empirical research, in my contribution I suggest to investigate Marxism as a subjectifying device, a discursive resource mobilizing and modifying its addressees and their relational positions in the political regime. The Marxist ideological content (speeches, agitation, proclamations) and practices induced a certain construction of the self, integrated in broader discourses, ideological dispositives and institutions. This
political communication induced contentious stances, positions disrupting the existing imaginary institution of society. Marxism was for a long time the main political language bringing about “polemicization of the commonplace”, thus activating new enunciatory positions and order of appearances in acts of discursive, political intervention. Presented insights into Marxists (re)subjectifications are an extract from a larger project investigating workers' reading and writing practices in early 20th century Russian Poland. I argue that it was this resubjectifying dimension of Marxism which gripped the workers, and it has to be rediscovered to make Marxism powerful yet another time."
Christopher Mastrocola
Kosik Today:The Dialectic of Knowledge as Emancipatory Project
One of the central themes running through the four chapters of karel Kosik’s 'Dialectic of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World', is that dialectical knowledge (or a dialectical epistemology) is an emancipatory approach to understanding social reality. In contrast to reductionist and positivist approaches, Kosik stresses the necessity of grasping social reality as a “concrete totality”: of grasping the unity of opposing categories such as present and history, matter and consciousness and most importantly for the present purpose, essence and appearance. The last of these involves grasping any aspect of reality through the unity and difference of its appearance and underlying essence, both of which are the products (whether intended or not) of historical human activity. Much of this, of course, is common enough to Hegelian and Marxist traditions. What Kosik uniquely introduces to this method, however, is the incorporation of Husserlian phenomenology. My presentation will seek to elaborate on this method and demonstrate the potentially positive benefits such a method can have for modern social movements. More specifically, it will suggest ways in which this method can help social movements overcome their all too common fragmented nature and disrupt the otherwise smooth reproduction and internalization of dominant ideologies.
Juan Pablo Mateo
The Reconfiguration of Global Capitalism and Basic Trends of Accummulation and Profitability
The purpose of this paper is to identify the mechanisms through which the reconfiguration of the world economy has impacted on the dynamics of profitability and capital accumulation. In recent decades, and particularly during the expansion phase of 2003-‐07, the accumulation process has been characterized by a weak productive investment (and as such low relative GDP and labor productivity rates of growth), the recurrence of speculative phenomena (the housing bubble) and an apparent high level of profitability. In these circumstances, most Marxist writers have not explained the Great Recession from the basic tendencies of the capitalist economy as enunciated by K. Marx. In opposition to these
overwork, underconsumption, and high rents in an effort to remain engaged in petty agricultural production despite the fact that the prerequisites for their liberation from agriculture and their land had been laid with the land tax reforms of 1873. He argued that a 'true resolution' of the global agrarian question was not simply a matter of the installation of capitalist relations of production in agriculture but required a transformation of these subjectivities -‐ 'feudal' barriers to their acquisition of a capitalist logic in which they to, try to endlessly expand other peoples' labor power as capital.
This presentation will clarify Uno's argument that World War I constituted an epochal moment for the agrarian question and will consider how his theorization may contribute to an understanding of the way that resolutions are sought by capitalist countries through a reconfiguration of empire. It will also critically engage with Uno's understanding of feudality in Japan's agrarian villages by referring to Kautsky's 1899 The Agrarian Question."
Ilya Matveev
Neoliberalism, Neopatrimonialism, and The Nature of The Political Regime in Russia
Neoliberalism and neopatrimonialism are distinct (and sometimes competing) theories used to explain the nature of the political regime in Russia. While neoliberal explanations focus on reforms which violently introduce market conditions and market logic in all spheres of life, theories of neopatrimonialism emphasize the authoritarian and clientelistic character of politics, the privatization of the state by various groups, and endemic corruption. The objective of my research is to use these two theories not as separate interpretations of Russian politics, but as indicators of two real logics operating within the Russian political regime. Neoliberal and neopatrimonial processes coexist and form a relationship with one another. I will present some preliminary remarks regarding the precise nature of this relationship, based on the analysis of the discursive struggle between the neoliberal and the 'anti-‐neoliberal' experts and think tanks with connections to various sections of the Russian political establishment. The analysis reveals the constant presence of these two positions in the public sphere and their frequent collision. Both neoliberals and their opponents, despite the tension between them, are crucial for the logic of the Russian political regime.
Brendan McGeever
The Bolsheviks and Antisemitism in the Russian Revolution, 1917-‐1919
This paper sets out to make an original contribution towards the critical understanding of the October Revolution through a unique case study of the Bolshevik attempt to confront antisemitism in the immediate aftermath of 1917. Based on extensive fieldwork in the Russian archives, the paper offers an analysis of the antiracist political formations that coalesced around the early Soviet state apparatus during the Revolution and Civil War (1917–1919). The paper develops and builds on Gramsci’s conception of the hegemonic apparatus by bringing into sharp focus the various types of individual and collective agency
that actualised the struggle against antisemitism during the Civil War. Whilst traditional interpretations of the Russian Revolution have assumed that the campaigns against racism and antisemitism were conceived and carried out by the Party leadership (i.e. Lenin and Trotsky etc), this paper will show that in the case of antisemitism, the anti-‐racist project that emerged within the Soviet state was in fact the product of a unique racial formation composed largely of non-‐Bolshevik Jewish Marxists and leftwing Zionists. The paper will then go on to reflect on these findings, arguing that they raise critical questions for how we conceptualise and understand not only the relationship between race and class, but also the legacy of Marxist attempts to arrest the racialisation of social relations more generally."
Scott McLemee
From "the Russian Question" to China (and Back Again): Debating China in Trotskyist Theory, 1950-‐58
"The historiography of Trotskyism too often tends to be an instance of Trotskyist historiography: a matter of political combat continued by other means. And nowhere has position-‐taking and line-‐consolidation been more obvious than in narrative treatments of debates on “the Russian question,” i.e. the problem of characterizing the political economy that developed under the Stalin regime and of assessing the precise class position and dynamics of the party-‐state apparatus. Three major “answers” were formulated within the movement during Trotsky’s lifetime, identifying the USSR as either a degenerated workers state, state capitalism, or bureaucratic collectivism. Many (possibly most) subsequent accounts of the debate have been written on the behalf of one position or the other. Creedal affirmation is typically accompanied by a sort of cod sociology-‐of-‐knowledge explaining the source and ideological function of the other positions.
The advance made by Marcel Van Der Linden's Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 (2007) comes only in part through its non-‐polemical perspective. Besides reconstructing the arguments developed within the Trotskyist movement alongside the theoretical approaches and conclusions of figures never in its ranks (such as Korsch, Hilferding, and Bordiga), Linden also offers a suggestive periodization of various Russian-‐question analyses, placing their emergence and development in the context of major phases in Soviet history.
In short, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union presents a major challenge to approaches that have prevailed in the secondary literature concerning the history of Left Opposition-‐derived political organizations. It breaks up the established and self-‐enforced patterning of differences. New constellations begin to form. And the charting of them is not exhausted by the typology and metatheoretical remarks that the book offers in conclusion.
Neither Linden nor anyone else has taken up the topic I will pursue. The victory of the People’s Liberation Army in 1949 and the system that then emerged under the rule of the
Chinese Communist Party were inevitably taken up by Trotskyists in terms derived from the various positions they had already formulated regarding the Russian question. But for some tendencies the degree of fit between concept and phenomenon was unclear or problematic. Complicating things still more was the rise of dirigiste states in other countries then winning national liberation. Zhou Enlai’s role at the Bandung Conference in 1955 underscored the need to understand the relationship between the Chinese system and the emerging postcolonial regimes. Finally, there was the need to assess how well the theory of permanent revolution accounted for any of these developments -‐-‐ or if it did at all.
A number of articles and internal documents by the Philips-‐Miller group within the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. expressed the clearest recognition that China and the Third World regimes posed a set of problems linked with, but distinct from, the Russian question. (Named after the party names of Art Fox and Steve Zeluck, respectively, the Philips-‐Miller current held a state-‐capitalist analysis. Based largely in Detroit, it was formed by supporters of the Johnson-‐Forest Tendency who remained within the SWP after C.L.R. James led most of his supporters out of it in 1951.)
Neither the Philips-‐Miller material nor the positions regarding China formulated by other tendencies are treated in Western Marxism and the Soviet Union. In its periodization and logic, the whole discussion moves at a diagonal to Linden’s lines of argument. But it offers the advantage of continuing his project of reframing the Russian question as a discursive field with implications not limited to the terms or the stakes of internal combat. In particular, reconstructing the China discussion will show that the the Russian-‐question debate itself involves a number of relays among basic concepts (including capitalism, bureaucracy, the bourgeois revolution, and the stratification and composition of the bourgeoisie itself) and how they articulate upon one another."
James Meadway
Surplus population, secular stagnation, and the ghost of Malthus: Rosa Luxemburg’s Anti-‐Kritik reconsidered
"The mainstream of economics, from Robert Barro to Larry Summers, has slowly begun to identify the problem of “secular stagnation” and decaying growth in the developed world. Meanwhile, the extraordinary reception given to Thomas Piketty’s work has strongly restated the notion of capitalism as a system driven not so much by its dynamic potential as the potential for enrichment by a powerful few. He, like other authors, has pointed to secular trends in population dynamics as perhaps holding the key to slowing growth rates into the future.
Rosa Luxemburg’s vigorous defence of her great work, The Accumulation of Capital, dealt directly with the mainstream of her day. Attacking the emergent, strongly neoclassical notion that economic growth could be read off population growth rates, she provided a
detailed defence of Marx’s alternative reasoning, in which the dynamic of capital accumulation in turn determined the dynamic of labour force growth. This paper links together the “crisis of work”, the problem of surplus labour, and the global demographic shift through a reconsideration of Luxemburg’s analysis. It demonstrates that the crisis of realisation relates directly to the expansion of capital accumulation into non-‐capitalist sectors and the expansion of the sphere of labour."
Kathryn Medien
Desiring the Monster: The Regulation of Intimacy in Israel/Palestine
"How is the regulation of sexual intimacy central to Israeli occupation of Palestine? This paper examines how the regulation of homo and heterosexuality is central to the (re)production of the Israeli nation, and its positioning of itself as a modern, progressive liberal state. Through an examination of Israeli state and non-‐state activism that seeks to maximise reproduction between Jewish Israeli citizens, and Israeli gay rights discourse, it will be argued that the regulation of intimacy is central to the occupation, harnessed to protect the Israeli nation and its citizens from ‘sexually deviant Palestinians’. Recent years have seen a growth in the literature examining the relationship between Israeli nationalism and sexuality (Puar 2013; Kuntsman 2008; Ritchie 2010). This paper shall contribute and push forward these debates, examining how the regulation of desire is central to the imagining and survival of Israel, linked to homo and heterosexual norms, and older colonial discourses of the sexually repressed, yet violent, Oriental male. Considering how desire is regulated is important, this paper concludes, if we are to better understand the tactics of survival employed by the Israeli state, and the myriad ways that sexuality and race are brought to bear on life.
Relevant streams: Homophobia and homonationalism before and after 9/11; Moving borders, regenerating boundaries: states, bodies, temporality; Social reproduction and capitalist transformation: micro and macro-‐analyses; Racism, femonationalism, Islamophobia: the bigger picture"
Pedro Mendes Loureiro
Open-‐ended, agential and growingly (too?) complex: comments on Bob Jessop’s approaches to the relationship between state power and capital
This paper analyses the evolution of Bob Jessop’s understanding of the relationship between state power and capital. We identify two inter-‐related tendencies behind the author’s theoretical developments, which are i) denying the a priori substantive unity of various aspects of social formations necessary for regularising capital accumulation, and ii) proposing an agential concept which can, under certain conditions, guarantee this unity in a partial, precarious and contradictory way. This leads to a growingly complex and open-‐ended framework. In light of this, and by identifying the debates and contexts in which the
arguments were successively put forward, we propose a general interpretation of the author’s theoretical propositions. We argue they are most meaningful as elements of an anti-‐politicist, anti-‐structuralist and anti-‐teleological approach, which stresses that the economic and extra-‐economic requisites of accumulation must be reproduced in and through agency. Finally, we comment on the drawbacks this implies for applied research. As it creates an ever-‐growing demand for substantiating the concepts in concrete, historical practices, pragmatic considerations of research feasibility might contradictorily lead to the necessity of taking for granted certain conditions of accumulation – effectively arriving at a structuralist and determinist approach, as many critics have argued.
Tobias Menely
“Verdampft: Energy, Air, and History in Marx”
Marx developed an indispensable theory of capital—as crisis-‐prone, self-‐expanding value—only by emphasizing social relation in place of the interchange between human and natural production. In my talk, I’ll discuss the figural instability in Marx’s invocations of the energy inputs and atmospheric outputs of economic activity, with the goal of identifying some challenges historical materialism faces in the Anthropocene. I’m interested in Marx’s explicit discussion, in Capital, of the significance of Britain’s transition to coal, but also in the more subtle metaphors of energy and atmosphere that underlie his conceptualization of history. The example from which I take my title is the famous “Alles ständische und stehende verdampft,” wherein the elemental transmutation involved in steam power—the turning of all that is solid into air, as Moore evocatively translated it—is made to describe a sociological transformation, the supplanting of the old social estates by capitalist class relations. While Marx recognizes the crucial role of coal in industrial production, as well as an essential thermodynamic alignment between “forces of nature” [Naturekraft] and “human labor-‐power” [Arbeitskraft], he defines the surplus-‐energy stored in coal “freely given”: “natural forces appropriate to productive processes, such as steam [and] water . . . cost nothing.” In the second part of my talk, I’ll turn to Marx’s language of atmosphere (air, mist, ether), as a synecdoche for “environment,” an infinite container inviting dispersal, and as a privileged figure for mystification, our haunted experience of absent causality.
Morgane Merteuil
« sexwork against work » : analyzing sexwork as a reproductive work issue
"It is argued here that the major legal framework proposed by European states to tackle the issue of prostitution – either the « abolition » or the « legalization » perspective – are serving a neoliberal agenda. If both these models are refused by most of the sex workers organizations, their own demands and analyses are still unheard, and fought against by large parts of the left and of the feminist movement, especially these last months in Western Europe. From a marxist perspective, this case is pretty unique: while ""the left"" (or
most radical left parties) as a whole do not have homogenous policies towards unions and social movements, they still cling to a general notion of ""working class"" politics. The left's disorientation towards sex workers unionists is a puzzling fact: how does one account for it in a materialist perspective?
This refusal from the progressive political forces to support sex workers has to be understood as an expression of the more general difficulties for these forces to think about reproductive work. If ""doing sex"" is to be considered as a form of reproductive work (as the author would argue), the arguments faced by sexworkers today boil down to one and the same claim: the idea that campaigning for wages in compensation for domestic labor (or reproductive work) amounts to a trivialization of it. This is pretty close to what the feminist movement argued against the Wages for Housework campaign. This is even more problematic today at the very moment when neoliberalism succeed in more and more commodify this work on a global scale.
This paper then aims at considering the struggles around reproductive work from a sex workers issues perspective, in order to draw the potential revolutionary perspectives to which the ""sex work is work"" claim invites us to. While escaping the dual pitfalls of ""soft"" prohibitionism and a liberal ideology of ""choice"", this perspective has notably the merit of uniting waged and unwaged women workers against both gender and class oppression ( then understood as different ""attributes"" of the same ""substance"")."
Atle Mikkola Kjosen
Anticipating Realization: Value's Logic of Movement and Amazon's Anticipatory Shipping "
The online retail giant Amazon was recently awarded a patent for its “method and system for anticipatory package shipping”. In essence, this patent describes how the retailer wants to build a system for delivering commodities to potential buyers before they place an order. Based on previous orders, items in the shipping cart, and tracking of web-‐browsing, the package is sent to a specified geographic area and while the package is in transit or waiting at a hub, the final delivery address is specified. What is the logic behind such methods? Why must exchange be anticipated?
This paper will use Amazon’s anticipatory shipping as an example with which to explore why and how value (and by extension capital) must move and accelerate. The paper will focus on the relationship between movement, the value-‐form and form-‐determination to account for why value must move, how it moves and by what means. The paper argues that the formal reason for why value must move can be located in the immanent contradiction of the commodity, which requires value to appear in its form. Prior to exchange, products are merely products of labour, use-‐values, but not yet consummated as values. There is an imperative to transport commodities as fast as possible to the market for value to be realized; anticipatory shipping is thus an articulation of this imperative."
Marcelo Milan
Demographic changes, Pension Reforms and Absolute Surplus Value: Intertemporal Exploitation in Contemporary Capitalism
This article proposes a Marxian interpretation of contemporary pension reforms around the world. Demographic changes that have been happening since the first industrial revolution, in particular population aging, imply a difficulty in replenishing the labor force, due to retirement, in a growing number of countries. This phenomenon has important consequences for the production of value and surplus value, insofar as it affects the inflow and outflow of labor power in the circuit of capital as well as the redistribution of social funds by means of taxes and government transfers. These reforms of pension and social security systems help keeping the flow of labor power into the circuit of capital for a longer time, mainly by means of imposing an increased minimum retirement age. This work analyses this increased working time as a form of intertemporal absolute surplus-‐value extraction. **Note to readers: there is no Honneth in my paper, but I simply cannot get rid of it from my key words**
Simon Mohun
Class and Class Struggle in the US economy 1918-‐2011
A Marxist approach to economic analysis focuses on social class rather than on individual agents. Class incomes depend upon a functional distribution of income, with wages earned by workers and profits earned by capitalists. But even the very richest in the US economy earn a substantial portion of their total income from employment. Wages do not only accrue to the working class. Accounting for this entails deriving time series (for the US economy 1918-‐2011) of a tri-‐partite classification of working class, managers who depend upon their labour income, and managers who could choose not to be employed by anyone; or, for short, workers, managers and capitalists. This enables a quantitative analysis of US classes and their dynamics over nearly a century, which can substitute for the more usual qualitative analysis coupled with quantitative guesswork.
Lorenza Monaco
India, NCR: Capital Strategies and Labour Resistance in a Globalising Auto sector
The intense wave of Labour unrest which has substantially shaken the Indian Sub-‐continent, and the recently industrialised National Capital Region in particular, somewhat leads to question the ‘India Shining’ picture and poses difficult challenges to the newly elected Modi Government. Undoubtedly, the Neoliberal development model pursued in the past few decades, supported by a progressively globalising elite, reveals a profound detachment from grassroots movements and Working Class demands. Examples of Labour organisation in the Automotive sector, and the unprecedented strikes which have occurred at the Maruti-‐
Suzuki Manesar plant in between 2011 and 2012, represent a very interesting case to look at Industrial Conflict and Capital – Labour relations within the Indian Democracy. Issues of Political Representativeness, of Workers’ Autonomy vs traditional forms of Union organisation , of sustainability of the implemented Labour regime are raised, together with an analysis of Capital onslaught which, with the active support of the State, has shifted from an initial attack to Workers’ rights to an open, utter violation of basic Human Rights.
Frederic Monferrand
Value-‐Form Theory as Critical Social Ontology
"In this paper, I would like to subtantiate the following hypothesis : the various trends of Marx's Capital interpretations that have (re-‐)emerged these past ten years under the name of “value-‐form theory” can and should be interpreted as part of an attempt to develop a critical social ontology.
Despite the deep differences that one can highlight between the works of Backhaus and Rancière (in Reading Capital) Postone and Arthur, or Kurz and Heinrich, all these researchers share an emphasis on the foundationnal (rather than historical) aspect of the first section of Marx's Capital and a critique of capitalism in terms of abstraction rather than in terms of alienation or exploitation. Even though some of them refuse the very concept of “ontology”, they all tend to present their work as an attempt to grasp the “deep structures” (Postone; 1993) or the “ontological ground” (Arthur; 2004) of capitalism. As opposed to most contemporary mainstream social ontology (Searle; 1995), or even to Western Marxist attempts to reconstruct Marx's ontology (Lukacs; 1978, Gould; 1978), they are not engaged in a description of the transhistorical features of society but rather in a historically specific analysis of how the value-‐form and its process of valorization shape the basic structures of social life. The social ontology they sketch can thus be said to be historical in the double sense that they apprehend social being as a process rather than as a substance and that they argue that it is only with the capitalist reification of social structures that “the social” can appear as an object of ontological inquiery.
I will try to elaborate on what I take to be to three main features of this critical social ontology: first, drawing on Marx's theory of fetishism, I will show that the value-‐form should be understood as a structure of daily-‐life social experience in capitalist social formations, that is, as what transcendantally circumscribes what is doable and thinkable under capitalism. Therefore, elaborating on Marx's theory of money, I will then argue that a critical social ontology should be a relationnal one, according to which the conditions of possibility of social objectivity should not be looked for in mental structures, as in mainstream social ontology, but rather in social structures. Finally I will turn to Marx's concept of “organic system” in the Grundrisse in order to examine how a critical social ontology should determine the interdependance of all the moments (production, consumption, distribution) that constitute capital as a social totality if it is to account for the differencieted forms of
thesis by explaining how capitalism did not emerge in other countries, rather than by taking one step further and exploring the plurality of other 'transitions'. In this context of inquiry, the case of Spain has been truly neglected, probably the only exception being Julie Marfany's very recent work on the Catalan transition (Marfany, 2012). Building and moving Brenner's work, Marfany has begun to carve some important inroads into what is perhaps a much more complex transition to capitalism. She points out at some stark contrasts with the English experience, like the much larger role of rural industry or Catalonia's unique property relations (rabassa morta), that sit uneasily with Brenner's model of the transition. In contrast to England, a much more centralised and homogenous country at the time of its transition, the Spanish countryside is a pluriverse institutional diversity, where parts of the country experienced diverging historical trajectories and almost every region operated along unique property relations.
This paper will sketch the problematique of a Spanish transition to capitalism, outlining the complexity of the Spanish case and presenting the challenges it poses. For example, if Brenner's model stresses the importance of depriving peasants of their means of material reproduction, forcing them off the land, how do we explain that Andalusian agriculture has relied on a huge mass of landless peasants since at least the 16th century? Does the institutional plurality of the Spanish case force us to speak of the transition as an uneven process, where capitalism 'arrived' in different stages, or do we need to focus on what may have been multiple transitions? The paper will present the Spanish case, raise some hypotheses on these issues, and address methodological and theoretical questions on how to theorise the transition to capitalism outside of England."
Kevin Morgan
Cult and anti-‐cult: Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky in the 1920s
The systematic promotion of the Lenin cult can be dated from immediately after Lenin’s death in January 1924. Conventionally, the cult is regarded, correctly, as an instrument of bureaucratic centralisation and forerunner of the Stalin cult that was grafted onto Lenin’s as Stalin consolidated his grip on power. What is less widely recognised is how far Trotsky, like other leading Bolsheviks, also lent his voice to the Lenin cult, and indeed had helped in paving the way for it even during Lenin’s lifetime. In exploring these conflicting uses of Lenin’s legacy, this paper describes how Leninism as the cult of party was used to isolate Trotsky, while Trotsky himself sought to focus on the qualities of revolutionary leadership with which he no less than Lenin was universally identified. The broader issue raised is that of why the left, including disparate strands of Marxism, has proved so susceptible to the cult of the individual. The more specific issue is that of how far Trotsky’s failure to contest this terrain, if not indeed that of Lenin himself, facilitated Stalin’s deployment of this instrument which became so central to the political culture of Stalinism.
Chana Morgenstern
Committed Literature in a Partitioned Land: The al-‐Jadid Communist Journal and the Making of a Palestinian and Arab-‐Jewish Literary Culture in 1950’s Israel/Palestine
In the 1950s and 1960s, a group of young Palestinian and Arab-‐Jewish (Mizrahi) Communist writers—who would later become prominent poets and authors in Israel and Palestine—began their careers as editors and writers for the Arabic arts and literature magazine al-‐Jadid, a cultural arm of the Israeli communist party. Palestinian writers such as Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habibi, Hana Ibrahim and Emile Tuma and Arab-‐Jewish (Mizrahi) writers such as Sami Michael, Shimon Ballas and Sasson Somekh coalesced around the journal as a space in which they could engage in the formation of a Communist cultural front to preserve Arabic culture and combat the developing milieu of Zionism and partition in Israel/Palestine. This paper will trace the literary history of this community of writers and their works, paying special attention to the cultural program that the journal developed and the way in which this program catalyzed literary production in the journal. Through an analysis of articles and manifestos, I will show how the journal advanced an aesthetic program that advocated for the development of a committed, internationalist and socialist realist Arabic literature that reimagined notions of Arab-‐Jewish collectivity. By uncovering and examining the lost literary archive of al-‐Jadid, I demonstrate the way in which the joint literature that the journal fostered provides us with critical proof of an anti-‐partition resistance culture rooted in the local development of Arab Marxist and decolonizing practices. This literature is an integral but under-‐researched part of the root system of Arab-‐Jewish (Mizrahi) and Palestinian literatures in Israel/Palestine. We need only consider the impact of writers such as Emile Habibi, Mahmoud Darwish, Shimon Ballas and Sami Michael on the intellectual history and literature of Palestine and Israel to understand the import of their common political and cultural foundations. The literary history of al-‐Jadid challenges the canonical separation of these writers into two hostile literary camps, and allows us to see their common roots in a Marxist, anti-‐partition literature that greatly impacted subsequent generations of Israeli and Palestinian writers.
Fred Moseley
Introduction to the English translation of Marx’s Manuscript of 1863-‐65
Marx’s only full draft of Volume 3 of Capital was written in the Economic Manuscript of 1863-‐65. Marx’s “Book III” manuscript was heavily edited by Engels for the first German edition of Volume 3 in 1894. It has been a long-‐standing question in Marxian scholarship concerning how much did Engels change Marx’s manuscript and are there significant differences between the two. Marx’s original manuscript was published for the first time in German in 1992 in the Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Section II, Volume 4.2, and this
important manuscript has now been translated into English (by Ben Fowkes) and will be published by Brill. I am the editor of the translation and have written an Introduction, which highlights the main differences between Marx’s original manuscript and Engels’ edited Volume 3, in my view. My paper will be this Introduction.
Baris Mucen
Constructing the Object of Analysis through the Category of Labour
"In my presentation I will attempt to show in which ways Marx’s methodology was constructed through the category of labour, yet in many of the Marxist (or non-‐Marxist) critical studies it was put into work through the category of capital. I will argue that this methodological shift took place in favor of a scientific analysis of the formation of the existing social inequalities (in economic or non-‐economic forms). Without negating the critical power of such studies I will problematize them by showing the ways in which they reduce the socio-‐historical reality to the social relations and process that are constructed as an object of analysis through the category of capital (i.e. in which ways the analytical object presents a reality subsumed by the category of capital.). Moishe Postone developed a similar critique of Marxist studies that focused on ‘modes of distribution’ early on in his work Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Yet he also analyzed the category of labour in its historical form within the relations of capital. In my presentation I will particularly analyze Lukacs’ late texts in which he tries to develop the concept of labour as an ontological category. Without getting into a debate whether we can consider labour as an ontological category or not, my aim will be to see its methodological consequences: how to construct an object of analysis through the category of labour. This attempt involves neither giving a central position to the labourer (as a subject position), nor focusing on the material production processes. Instead, I will reconsider our main categories and concepts (such as temporality, knowledge, fact, historicity) that we use while constructing objects of analysis through the category of capital.
Marieke Mueller
How the Bourgeoisie survives: class and collective subjectivities in Sartre’s later work
"This paper examines Jean-‐Paul Sartre’s theory of class, focussing particularly on the theorisation of the bourgeoisie in 'L’Idiot de la famille' (1971-‐2), his biography of Flaubert. My paper will argue that Sartre’s concern with the reproduction of the bourgeoisie in his later texts suggests the formation of a conception of class subjectivity which combines elements of class consciousness and ideology and which further often resonates with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class, despite the latter’s well-‐known criticism of 'L’Idiot'.
Whilst 'L’Idiot' upholds the fundamental concepts of Sartre’s earlier notion of class, such as the absence of any organic class unity, my paper will suggest that 'L’Idiot' re-‐evaluates the social realm, marking a shift towards collective subjectivities. Sartre’s analysis of the school
system as conveyor of ‘serialized competition’ (opposed to Flaubert’s feudal attitude), and Sartre’s recurrent reference to the idea of ‘distinction’ will serve to highlight the presence of opposed class subjectivities in 'L’Idiot' and to further suggest a pre-‐figuration of Bourdieu’s thought.
The theory of generations in Sartre’s later work will then be interpreted as part of the same concern, namely to theorise the coming-‐into-‐being and the re-‐generation of bourgeois class subjectivity. My paper will conclude that Sartre’s historical and theoretical interest in class is further inscribed in his concern for the political situation after 1968, again suggesting a convergence of interests between Sartre and Bourdieu."
Andrew Murray
Socialised and Specialised Labour on the Charterhouse of Champmol
The sculptural program of the Charterhouse of Champmol (built c. 1370-‐1410) has been argued by many to have been the most innovative and influential in northern Europe in the late fourteenth-‐ and early fifteenth-‐centuries. Its sculpture was often life-‐size, fully rounded or in deep relief, highly naturalised and comprised complex combinations of materials. Previous art-‐historians have argued that the key condition for this sculpture were the talent and skills and of the sculptors. But this ‘skill’ has been inadequately theorised either as their ‘genius’, or as the ‘freedom’ provided to them by the long-‐term patronage of the Valois-‐Burgundian dukes. By closely examining the receipts and account entry records of the Charterhouse, this paper will provide an alternative understanding of skill: that it involves a combination of socialised labour (the need for sculptors to interact with other workers) and specialised labour (defined as managerial authority being devolved to sculptors themselves, rather than seeing their work directed by masons). Such an understanding of skill gives us some insights into the appearance of the sculpture of the Champmol. But it also allows us to periodize it to the intensified division of labour developing in the towns of Northern Europe in the fourteenth century, the towns where these sculptors were initially trained.
Matthew Myers
Cars, Crisis, Conflict: British car workers in the 1970s and the unmaking of the British working class
This paper focuses on the experiences of British car workers during the global economic crisis in the 1970s using a social historical perspective. At its heart are the everyday experiences of work, political agitation, and shop-‐floor conflicts, which characterised the British car industry in the 1970s. As the British car industry attempted to confront competition from overseas and decreasing profits at home, conflicts over jobs, conditions, and wage-‐rates affected the whole industry, and provided one of the key industrial battlegrounds. The shift from a militant, confident, and well organised network of car workers across Britain in the late 1960s to a weakened and neutered one in the mid 1980s
has hereto been largely an undervalued aspect of our industrial history, yet which has many lessons over how workers confront capitalism’s attempt to restore profitability to the system. Through analysing the specific historical experience of British car workers during the 1970s crisis we can better understand this global process. The paper will also explore the role of revolutionary politics within the industry, the role of gender inside and outside the car factories, and attempt to draw lessons for present struggles.
Miryam Nacimento.
Capital accumulation in the Alternative Development industry and the reproduction of drug policies in Peru
"The current international drug regime has established a variety of measures aimed at suppressing the production, distribution and consumption of cocaine. Coca leaves are the raw material for this illicit substance, which is traditionally grown by a large number of peasants (cocaleros) in the Andean region. In order to limit their production diverted to the illegal market, Alternative Development policies have been promoted by the United Nations and implemented by coca growing countries like Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador for the past 20 years. These interventions have sought alternatives for the cultivation of illegal crops by promoting broad “sustainable rural development” strategies directed to coca-‐growing peasants.
In this context, and following the “shared responsibility” principle, big amounts of foreign aid have been directed to fund Alternative Development programs in Peru. Donors like the United Nations, the United States and the European Union have played a central role in the implementation of these programs. However, over the years evidence confirms that despite AD interventions have caused some reductions in drug crop cultivation, this has occurred only within specific areas and without having a deeper impact in global drug supply.
In this presentation I will address the problem of the inertial reproduction of ineffective drug control policies like Alternative Development by analyzing its relationships with foreign aid dynamics in the Andean countries. I will examine the Alternative Development policy model as an industry where different fractions of capital steaming from the international cooperation institutions, governmental agencies, civil society advocates and cocalero organizations meet in complex (and uneasy) ways. As I will show, these different fractions struggle, negotiate and organize a particular form of capital accumulation that ends up allowing and nurturing the drug policy inertia.
I will discuss these matters by focusing my analysis on the implementation of an Alternative Development program located in Satipo, a longstanding coca growing region in Peru. First, I will depict the everyday practices of the different actors involved in the implementation of this program. In doing so, I will also explain the organic relations of capital formation within which each of these actors are embedded. Secondly, I will analyze the different narratives
about Alternative Development that are advanced by these actors and how they are informed and recreated through their everyday interaction. Finally, I will link both aspects in order to examine how these interactions are framed in a particular form of capital accumulation that ends up supporting the perpetuation of the Alternative Development industry.
In this way, my analysis will seek to explain the reproduction of this policy model by disentangling its internal organic properties as well as the common senses that are present in the dynamic governing of the Alternative Development industry. In doing so, I will use a neo Gramscian theoretical approach, which acknowledges the capitalist conditions of existence underlying every social practice. In this sense, I will highlight the interactions between ideas and its material circumstances as well as the way in which these interactions help to reproduce a particular type of drug control policies, like Alternative Development interventions."
Selim Nadi
Why do we need an indigenous party in France?
In January 2005, several anti-‐racist activists and organizations send out a call (“l'Appel des Indigènes de la République”). This call is the founding document of the Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (M.I.R) which became the Parti des Indigènes de la République (P.I.R) in 2010. The project of the M.I.R/P.I.R was not to build a lobby but to create a real political force for the non-‐whites in France and a grassroots popular movement . In France, non-‐whites are excluded by the political system and this is the basis of what Sadri Khiari called the neo-‐indigeneity (néo-‐indigénat, in reference to the oppressive status of colonial subjects in the French Empire). The main French parties – both from the right and from the left – have pursued policies that are more and more against the interest of the non-‐white population. This is why the creation of the P.I.R was a political necessity; although a large part of the left criticize the P.I.R because they think that it is a “racialist” organization and not an anticapitalist one. The creation of the P.I.R put the concept of “social-‐race” into the French political field which was obsessed by the “class question” in an abstract way and totally forget the “race” in the struggle (this is why a lot of non-‐white from the french banlieues consider the french left as “traitors”). In front of the P.I.R the French left is politically and theoretically disarmed : they do not understand why is the P.I.R – an autonomous non-‐white organization – necessary to fight capitalism and to show how race contributes to the perpetuation of capitalism. The goal of this organization was to contribute to a new popular bloc congenial to the interests of non-‐white people in the French Metropolis and to analyze racism in a materialist way, a way that the French left does not understand. The moralistic version of antiracism conveyed by the French left, that the latter asserts against the PIR's analyses , is a true nemesis for struggles led by people of color. This is partly due to the overwhelming French left ideology according to which the main problem is to fight capitalism – which “has no color” – and that organizing non-‐white
people is not an anti-‐capitalist struggle but just a “cultural struggle” or identity-‐politics. The main accusation against the P.I.R was the accusation of “communautarisme” (this word does not exist in the english vocabulary but can be translated by “cultural-‐sectarianism”), but the P.I.R is not a cultural organization, it is a political one which is focusing it struggle against racism as a system (which was theorized, in the French context, by Sadri Khiari, a Tunisian activist and a former member of the 4th International) and is taking distance with the dogmatic and colorblind notion of “class” in the French context – certainly not doing away with the relevance of class as such, as the Party's political project is a coalition and hegemonic bloc with white popular classes. Analyzing the history of the P.I.R is very important to show how this organization put the race question in the French marxist political field.
Jonathan Neale
From Copenhagen to Paris -‐ the climate justice movement and the contradictions of ruling class climate strategies
"How does the climate justice movement respond to the Paris COP? We start with the ruling class. To halt runaway climate change will require leaving the carbon in the ground, extensive government regulation, and massive public works programmes. (Climate jobs campaigns are an attempt to do this sooner rather than later.) The ruling class know this. They also understand the science. And they own the world – they don't want to wreck it.
But they are paralysed because massive public works and regulation would mean the end of the neoliberal project. And since 2008 the pressures of increased international competition rule out the extra expense for any competing national capital. In addition, those based on high carbon corporations want no action on all.
The ruling class are divided, confused, and face pressure from organised scientists, NGOs and a wider public. So greenwash is piled upon contradiction. And the outcome of Paris will be terrible. The danger is repeating the demoralisation after Copenhagen. So the climate movement needs a response big enough to say this is only the beginning of the fight. The talk will report on the state of play on this by November."
John Nescher
The Spatial Dimension of Historical Materialism:On Chinese Experiences
"China is now experiencing a spatial fixing of its capital. The capital needs space in physical ,social or spiritual state. Although there are differences between the capitalist and socialist countries, but the capital seems more similar, and it plays a great role than before in socialist countries . It seemed that the economic crisis is lasting with spatial fixing over the world and it is obvious that china is effected.
We should have a spatial perspective in historical materialism. (1)The production becomes spatial production in contemporary. Urbanization is import in present China.(2)The class struggle may becomes street and landscape struggle. The fighting for stability in street is more important in present China. The stability is based on the spatial management.(3)Space and society is the key relation in developing socialism with Chinese characteristic . With the help of the capital and without the hurting of capital, Chinese should have a new location of its society.(4)The struggling for public space is important in understanding new dimension of historical materialism. Spatial justice and the right to city in China is the key element in building democracy . We should pay more attention on the capital role in struggling for geography. (5)Going to urban society: An new step for Chinese construction of its socialist building. There is new discourse to describe the present situation of China.And there should be a new urban society model than the countryside one for looking into future of China.
The new situation in China is important for the contemporary development of historical materialism . Especially there are some spatial strategy in contemporary China, such as rural areas encircling the cities, the rural household contract responsibility system, the urbanization, the integration of urban and rural areas. Maybe the spatial perspective is the key to understand Chinese development and it is important to develop historical materialism."
Immanuel Ness
South African Mineworkers and Class Struggle Unionism
Paper chronicles and critically examines the formation of new worker organizations in South Africa’s mining sector from 1998 to the present. In the mining sector, migrant and local workers are paid low wages, live in poverty, and work in grueling and dangerous jobs. Workers are resisting through joining autonomous general assemblies and engaging in sit-‐down strikes, often without the support of the National Mine Union. Examination and analysis of democratic workers struggles, workplace and community mobilization, class-‐struggle unionism, Marikana massacre, COSATU, NUMSA, Amcu, and new union formations, and historic twenty week platinum strike in 2014.
Barbara Neukirchinger
Critical Theory, Poststructuralism and the intersection of gender and disability
"In this paper I will discuss the interlocking of gender and disability within a framework that draws together Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, and Intersectionality. While gender and disability generate special forms of discrimination, feminist disability studies, that focuses on commonalities regarding identity politics, experiences of oppression or a cultural body history, is still at the beginning. My aim is to broaden this research with an examination of
structural socio-‐economic conditions by using the Critical Theory of Adorno and Horkheimer.
I want to investigate, if these approaches can be combined for a comprehensive analysis of inequality, because poststructural and intersectional influenced ideas are often seem to lack a profound analysis of capitalist structures. Critical Theory is characterised by a distinctive socio-‐critical and economic-‐based analysis of underlying structures, but is often evaluated as overly generalising in portraying contemporary societies. Simultaneously poststructural theories provide a finer picture of social differences and the consequential power relations.
Therefore, the research project strives to assess how the association of these approaches can advance the understanding of the interlocking of gender and disability in neoliberal society and the influence of structural factors, how theoretical oppositions can be overcome to contribute to prevailing approaches in (feminist) disability studies."
Patrick Neveling
The flexibility of accumulation before "flexible accumulation": cornerstones for a post-‐fictional historical anthropology of the twentieth century capitalist world-‐system
I argue that mainstream assessments of the rise of neoliberalism are highly problematic for two reasons. First, neoliberalism did not appear as a watershed in the world-‐system after the 1970s global crisis, as many macro-‐approaches would have it. Instead, if we can speak of a neoliberal model at all, this emerged in the 1930s and became powerful via US policies towards the Global South. Since the US-‐Truman administration's Point Four program of the late 1940s policies were about maintaining, and not establishing, deregulated labour relations and "off-‐hands" postcolonial policies towards multinational corporations. Notions of a global emergence of neoliberalism are then, at best, Western-‐centric orientalisms. Second, the global spread of export processing zones (EPZs) and special economic zones (SEZs) is often propagated as one of the defining features of a global shift in the 1970s. This is often associated with a rise of Newly Industrialised Countries (NIC) in East and Southeast Asia. A concise enquiry of the spread of such zones on a global scale and in particular national settings reveals two very different periodisations, however. The world's first EPZ was set up in Puerto Rico in 1947. Similar policies spread rapidly in the 1950s. If we consider the impact of these policies on the ground, it is evident that the shift from Fordism to neoliberalism that is so central to macro-‐models in anthropology, never actually happened. What is called neoliberal was instead a slight revision of existing colonial policies in many nations of the Global South.
Mirko Nikolic
"All That Is Air Melts Into City". Sketches of a “flat ontological” political economy
How do we bring nonhuman entities into the social, or how do we forge “collectives of humans and nonhumans” [Latour, 2000]? This is, in my view, one of the key political questions for the Anthropocene and beyond. More than giving “voice” to nonhumans, through my doctoral research I explore aesthetic modes of making tangible labour of nonhumans that is invisible in humans’ economy and inventing possible ways of working together with them. The aim of this endeavour is not an economic product, not even a social relation (immaterial labour), instead it is conjunction, “[to] enter into relation with entities not composed of our matter, not speaking our language, and not reducible to the communication of discreet, verbal, or digital signs.” [Berardi, 2012] As such, this practice tries to deterritorialize away from semio-‐capitalism into the realm of political ecology, to imagine a “politics of vital materialism” [Bennett, 2010].
In my recent art/research project All That Is Air Melts Into City I have tackled the idea of political/economic representation of carbon-‐dioxide (CO2), the crucial greenhouse gas yet intangible to our senses. The project is a materialisation of the circulation of carbon-‐dioxide through human and non-‐human ecologies.
Carbon-‐dioxide takes a panoply of shapes as it moves between air, animal bodies, plants, rocks, combustion engines, and further. Recently it has become an economic figure too, the main protagonist of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), electronic financial market for trading in “allowances” to release tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere -‐ European Emission Allowances, or simply “carbon stocks”. This market’s logic is complex and its movements are hard to discern almost as it is difficult to see the molecules of CO2 in the sky. Yet, this market is materially sited in the City of London, and the greenhouse effect is real.
Through a performative walk across London, I have enacted a series of potential financial exchanges of carbon stocks at a human pace. At the same time, I have tracked the photosynthetic activity of the vegetation in the city, the effective volumes of CO2 in the air, and paralleled this with live streamed financial data about the trading of the carbon stock. These different types of information have been streamed near-‐live on an online platform thus bringing together a multitude of actors that are not (yet) economically and politically related. The electronic stock market, the photosynthetic labour of trees and movements of the air are assembled and represented together, thus revealing the present disjunctions but also possible conjunctions.
This is but one of the tentative steps in reimagining our political economy in the time of climate change, and I would like to share it with the public of the Historical Materialism conference and discuss possible ways of moving this artistic/theoretical research further.
More information about the project at> http://allthatisairmeltsintocity.cc/
August Nimtz
The Bolsheviks Come to Power: A New Interpretation
"Three years after the Bolshevik-‐led triumph in October 1917, Lenin wrote that his party’s “participation” in the four Russian State Dumas between 1906 and 1915 was “indispensable” in that success. A detailed reading of that experience supports Lenin’s claim as well as making it possible to connect for the first time the dots between Marx and Engels’s electoral/parliamentary strategy and what the Bolsheviks carried out in the October Revolution. This is a distillation of the evidence presented in my recently published two-‐volume book,*Lenin’s Electoral Strategy: The Ballot, the Streets—or Both. *"
Tony Norfield
Capitalist Power: Fictitious Capital, Corporations and Finance
The financial system both reflects capitalist economic power and is a means of reinforcing it. This is shown not simply in the subordination of debtors (countries, companies or individuals) in a 'credit crunch', but, more importantly, in the regular, day-‐to-‐day operations of the financial system. Such power is wielded not only by banks and other financial institutions, but also by the state and all kinds of capitalist company. Modern capitalism takes a financial form, one that marshals society's resources for the benefit of the few. This paper details the main forms in which this happens today, analysing the international flow of funds, the foreign exchange, bond and equity markets and explaining the central role of what Marx called 'fictitious capital' (financial securities). It will examine how the major imperialist countries dominate global financial markets and are able to use these to appropriate surplus value from the rest of the world economy.
Diana O'Dwyer & Eileen Connolly
Internationalising Gramsci’s Concept of the Integral State in a Neoliberal Capitalist Era: NGOs and Outsourcing the State
"This paper integrates Gramsci’s concept of the integral capitalist state as a dialectical unity of political and civil society with his dual concept of passive revolution, in the context of transnationalising neoliberal capitalism. Tracing the evolution of the integral capitalist state via two interlinked passive revolutions – neoliberal restructuring of established capitalist states from the 1980s and the concurrent intensified globalisation of neoliberal capitalist state forms flowing from the (re-‐)establishment of capitalism in formerly Stalinist states – it argues that contrary to social-‐democratic accounts of a ‘retreat’ of the state, the relationship of political and civil society in the integral state has instead been reconfigured. One important way this has occurred is through the outsourcing, initially of service, and later of policy and ideological functions from political society/government to government-‐supported civil society organisations or NGOs.
This has helped capitalism to survive by further constraining the already severely limited autonomy of civil society from capitalist interests, tightening the integration of civil and political society, and reinforcing civil society’s hegemonic role of continually (re-‐)legitimising the capitalist state and the class relations it maintains. Politically, it offers the increased ‘flexibility’ and political deniability of subcontracted governance, at a time when public trust in NGOs also far exceeds that in governments, political parties or corporations. Economically, it reinforces a non-‐profit tier within the economic base, characterised by low wages and conditions. This reduces costs for the state and the social demands on capital, while enabling these relations of production to be justified ideologically vis-‐à-‐vis NGOs’ non-‐profit or charitable purpose.
Drawing on original research into the international NGO campaigns to ban landmines and cluster munitions, the paper shows how this closer integration of civil and political society has worked to legitimise a Western-‐dominated international capitalist order and the Western-‐dominated world military order that sustains it. Western-‐based NGOs working in ‘partnership’ with Western governments are key actors in this, both domestically and in the South, where together with local ‘partner’ NGOs, they insinuate Western-‐based transnational capitalist interests within peripheral and semi-‐peripheral states. This reinforces historical processes of uneven and combined development and helps create international ideological support for an international capitalist order that remains Western-‐dominated. Such transnational ‘NGOisation’ represents a largely neglected dimension of both the ‘internationalisation of the state’ and comprador capitalism."
Blair Ogden
What is Divine Violence? Towards a Definitive Account "‘Benjamin’s remarks about divine violence are too condensed, opaque and elliptical to interpret in any definitive manner.’
Jay Bernstein, Violence: Thinking Without Banisters (20013)
Today there is still little consensus about what Walter Benjamin actually meant by divine violence. Commentators disagree over three simple questions. Who is the agent of divine violence? Is it necessarily lethal? Is it ethical? My paper will outline (and defend) a plausible philosophical interpretation of what Benjamin meant by divine violence. The Critique of Violence provides us with two quasi-‐definitions of the term. One thing we know with certainty is what it is not: Benjamin clearly states that divine violence is the antithesis of mythic violence. Another strategy employed by Benjamin is to define divine violence by examining its consequences: one of its consequences is that it destroys the law; another one of its consequences is that it expiates guilt from human beings etc. Rather than trying to improve upon these quasi-‐definitions I will argue that we should be asking a much more interesting philosophical question: namely: how is divine violence actually possible? In other
function. Its aim is to reveal the ”upside down turned world” of capitalist production relations, a world which is created by the fetishisms of commodity economy. In this respect, Marx’s idea of dialectics parallels to Kant’s, who spoke of the dialectics as a ”critique of illusions” (Kritik des Scheins): the critical philosophy reveals the origin of illusions of transcendental judgements (KrV B 234 sqq.). In an analogous manner, the theory of commodity fetishism serves for Marx to unveil the illusion(s) of bourgeois political economy, which accepts the surface appearances of economic life without questioning them. So there is in this respect a clear resemblance between the dialectics in Kant and in Marx.
Chris O’Kane
The Symbol of Power, The Form of Thought: Money, Measure and Abstraction in Foucault and Sohn-‐Rethel
This contribution to the critical theory stream looks to draw on Michel Foucault’s comments on money in the recently translated Lectures on the Will to Know in order to compare Foucault’s and Alfred Sohn-‐Rethel’s accounts of how measure and abstraction developed in tandem with the emergence of the Ancient Greek Market. In particular, it will compare how their respective interpretations differ in regard to Foucault’s conception of the ‘symbolic power’ of money and Sohn-‐Rethel’s conception of ‘real’ and ‘conceptual abstraction.’ Although it is usually argued that Foucault possessed a neo-‐Ricardian interpretation of Marx, and that Sohn-‐Rethel provided a seminal value-‐theoretical interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy, I will also endeavour to show how Foucault’s account of the historical-‐specificity of the Ancient Greek market can be used to improve Sohn-‐Rethel’s trans-‐historicism and move towards bringing their accounts of power and thought into alignment with each other.
Benjamin Opratko
“Gramsci’s Relevance” reconsidered. Theorising Hegemony, analysing Racism
"In 1986, the late Stuart Hall published his seminal “Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity”. Preoccupied with intervening in a specific conjuncture of (the crisis of) Marxism, it formulated a powerful critique of “orthodox” Marxism in rather general terms, yet remained rather vague in terms of concrete inquiries in the nature of racism(s). Almost thirty years later, the question of “Gramsci’s relevance” remains with us: How could a Gramscian theoretical framework – that is, a framework of Marxist analysis that places the question of hegemony at its centre – contribute to a deeper understanding of the ways in which contemporary racism(s) work?
This paper discusses the possibilities opened up by Gramsci, Hall and others, of analysing racism as an integral aspect of capitalist hegemony. In a first part, elements of a Hegemony-‐
Clément Paradis
From the hotel to the brothel: Proust’s capitalist ballet
“You don’t expect readers to believe that there’s actually a link between Proust and the Marxist theory, do you?” might ask the careful reader. Without any provocation, my answer will be clear: “let’s read In Search of Lost Time again it hasn’t revealed all its secrets.” One of them lies in the hotels depicted by the narrator: some of them are of course luxury hotels, where aristocrats and bourgeois observe themselves and fantasize about the working class serving them. But Proust also describes another kind of hotel: the brothel… where the same population meets, served once again by honest people exploited to the very core of their psyche and sexuality – or, as Lukács explains, reified, because everything and everybody is to be consumed in these hotels by the clients, the staff included. The logic of the hotels, every one of them, is the logic of prostitution. As Jupien, the director of a hotel hiding a homosexual brothel, explains: “Here, contrary to the doctrine of the Carmelites, it is thanks to vice that virtue is able to live.” Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees aren’t far. Proust thus reveals the logic of the economy of his world – a liberal logic based on the disposability of human beings. The author is here at the core of modernity: as French philosopher Michel Clouscard explains, the prostitute is the “key-‐commodity”; it is the origin of the reciprocal engendering of market and desire. Unexpectedly, Proust describes, at the end of his novel, a complex economical system, that the Marxist theory can help us decipher and that shows how capitalism survives through the reciprocal promotion of the power of money, sex, youth and beauty, in a real market of desire.
Michael Patrick McCabe
A Left Without a State: Confronting the Climate Crisis in the Context of Neoliberal State Restructuring and Left Anti-‐Statism
This paper problematizes neoliberal state restructuring through the lens of climate change in order to challenge the politics of anti-‐statism and decentralization that have become dominant on the Left; most recently exemplified by the Occupy movement, but found in the climate justice movement. The nation-‐state is the only institution with the coercive ability and financial resources to confront and transcend the carbon-‐economy, while adapting to the negative externalities produced by it. However, neoliberal state restructuring has redirected the regulatory and interventionist mechanisms of the nation-‐state toward the singular function of facilitating market processes of accumulation. An additional consequence of neoliberal state restructuring has been a model of austerity that, in the United States and the European Union, has resulted in a steady decline in national funding for climate initiatives. As a result, the burden of developing and implementing solutions to climate change is devolved to subordinate scales of government that lack the structural and budgetary capacity to effectively operationalize climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. Therefore, if the Left is to effectively address climate change, it must develop a
political program that focuses on confronting, and ultimately controlling the state as a means by which to redirect its functions away from neoliberal objectives and toward emancipatory goals that, in the context of climate change, range from structural transformations in the energy-‐economy to global climate change adaptation and mitigation initiatives.
José Paulo Guedes Pinto
The political economy of the crowdsourcing: intellectual subjection of labor to capital
"It is known that lots of companies are using “mass collaboration” or crowdsourcing as an alternative and/or a complement to outsource their production. The diference is that crowdsourcing relies on ""free"" individual agents that come together and “cooperate” to improve a given operation or solve a problem. This can be incentivized by a reward system, though it is not required.
In this paper we will put in a critical perspective the act of crowdsource inovations by major companies. We will present some case studies and discuss if the concept of superexploitation, for example, is adequate to comprehend these new form of labor that emerges in post-‐large-‐scale industry enterprises. One argument is that the previous concept fails to grasp a new form of labor subjection to capital. Albeit this kind of labor is still under a real subjection to capital, we can tell that it is not anymore material (as in large-‐scale industries) but intellectual. The main question here is why there are a lot of workers that supply these enterprises with their expertise almost for free? Class struggle still exists, of course, but it takes new concepts to understand these ""new"" forms of exploitation."
William A. Pelz.
Failed Experiment or Useful Example? The International Working Men’s Association’s attempts to promote the Emancipation of Labour, 1864-‐1876 "Failed Experiment or Useful Example? The International Working Men’s Association’s attempts to promote the Emancipation of Labour, 1864-‐1876
This paper, drawing heavily on the minutes of meetings and memories of leading participants, will argue that there are significant lessons that can be learned from the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA). The organization was a historically brief attempt at labour internationalism but there remain many things that may be learned from this experience. The organizational model of the International will be examined to determine both its positive and negative features. In addition, an attempt will be made to evaluate:
-‐importance of the fight against slavery and racism by the IWMA,
-‐internationalism as one of the appealing contributions of the International,
-‐the articulation of a radical critique of nationalism,
-‐the difficulty of maintaining a diverse organization that combined rival political ideologies,
-‐problem of being an open organization in a time of repression.
Finally, a look must be cast beyond the actual real problems of the IWMA to the importance of the International in winning some workers to the idea of internationalism and labor activism.
Sanja Petkovska
Cultural studies in Serbia: an endless revision of an 'absent' referent
Cultural studies are known as one of the most recent developments of Marxism emerged along with and in a response to post-‐modernism. If the imaginary line from the period of socialist republic is to be drawn, the last previous echoes of Marxist theory have appeared in critical theory known for criticizing the Tito's regime -‐ the Praxis group or school of Marxist humanist philosophy. On the other side, the contemporary state of critical theory is echoed in local, unclear version of cultural studies. The primarily Marxist origin of British cultural studies, but also of French post-‐modernism and Frankfurt critical theory so-‐called Western Marxism), can easily be traced in the works of people associated with those movements of thought. But if we take as an example the contemporary developments of cultural studies in Serbia, whether we can trace their connection to Marxism and critical theory at all? Our object of consideration is to be the architecture of post-‐socialist revisionism of socialist heritage and of critical theory by mapping the discontinuity produced in thought by importing cultural studies in an ironically ahistorical and amaterialistic fashion. Furthermore, the argument to be presented would be stating that a given state of contemporary developments/echoes of Marxist theory almost completely lack the critical reflection not towards their own origin, but also towards the given post-‐socialist reality.
Bruna Piazentin Martinelli
Gender and sexuality: particularities of the labor force and the accumulation in telemarketing.
The following paper to be presented on the Eleventh annual Historical Materialism Conference is a result of reflections that are realized in my master´s research, at the department of sociology of Unicamp, in Brazil. In this research I study the teleworkers of Campinas – São Paulo and their political experiences, in order to understand the composition of the contemporary working class, as well the main tendencies and aspects of the actual capitalism. The teleworkers compose a historical recently category, they are a result of the changes in the capital accumulation pattern occurred circa 1980s, when the technological increment on the work, the increase of the service sector and the globalization of capital occurred. In Brazil, is from 1990s – when the international division of
labor, and the neoliberalism and the waves of privatization settled in the country – that the telemarketing appears as a capital accumulation sector. The teleworkers are mostly young women, which also has a significant number of homosexuals and transsexuals. The goal of this paper is to develop a brief analysis and debate about the following questions: what´s the reason of a large number of women working in telemarketing? How the female working force is explored in this sector in order to encourage their accumulation of capital? What is the reason to find in telemarketing a large number of homosexuals and transgender from less wealthy classes? How these new features reconfigure aspects of the working class in the struggle between capital and labor, and their political experiences? Among other issues that also will appear in the discussion that the paper is going to present about the current functioning of capitalism and the working class.
Herbert Pimlott
‘1979’ or ‘Thatcherism Revisited’: Rethinking the ‘Crisis’ of the Conjuncture through Cultural Materialism
On the 35th anniversary of the publication of the late Stuart Hall's ‘Thatcherism’ thesis in Marxism Today, and of Margaret Thatcher’s first of three general election victories, this paper offers a rethinking of the period of ‘crisis’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s by drawing upon Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism (I use ‘1979’ as the cypher for this period of ‘reaction’, versus ‘1968’ as the cypher for the radical 1960s). The paper argues that part of the weakness of Hall’s Thatcherism thesis was its location within a particular ‘aesthetic-‐intellectual formation’, which alongside Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘Forward March of Labour Halted?’ thesis, overlooked working-‐class, counter-‐hegemonic formations. A key part of understanding ‘1979’, involves analysing the process of re-‐formation of the working class through an analysis of the ‘structure of feeling’, as expressed via forms of working-‐class ‘practical consciousness’ in an ‘(pre)emergent culture’. The subsequent failure of radical counter-‐hegemony cannot just be ascribed to Thatcherism's 'authoritarian populism' per se, but needs to take into account other aspects of the processes of ideological domination via mass media, government and political parties, which can be understood in part via Williams’s ‘constitutional authoritarianism’, and in part through identifying the failure of a radical working class ‘emergent culture’ to become fully emergent.
Simon Pirani
Fossil fuel consumption: how are you counting?
"Global fossil fuel consumption in 2000-‐2009 was running at more than four times the level of 1950-‐1959. Since fossil fuel consumption, and production, are key causes of global warming, it is generally accepted that reduction of both would be a good thing. And yet policies aimed at reducing consumption, at both national and international level, have failed – a striking fact of modern history. Since the 1980s, these policies have neither reversed, nor
even slowed down, the aggregate fossil fuel consumption growth rate. Research on what drives the increase from the consumption side, and the context of and reasons for these policy failures, is obviously relevant to discussion on climate change.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the first place means reducing fossil fuel consumption. The way that emissions, and consumption, are counted is highly political. Much academic work in disciplines such as industrial ecology and structural ecology uses models based on the IPAT equation (impact = population x affluence x technology) and variants thereof. The paper will argue that such approaches often downplay or ignore the role of economic and power relations that shape industries, infrastructures and technologies that account for most emissions. Vast differences not only in consumption levels by different people, but also between different types of consumption (for manufacture by the company that employs you? for personal use?) receive little attention. Neo-‐colonial economic relations between the developed countries and others are also often downplayed, although consumption-‐based accounting of emissions (i.e. attributing emissions to the country where stuff is consumed, instead of where it is made) has begun to counter that.
The paper will review methods of counting emissions, and fossil fuel consumption; consider some of the notable trends in consumption over the past fifty years; and propose research methods that could help to analyse consumption in the context of capitalist social relations. It is part of a project on the global history of fossil fuel consumption on which the author has begun work in early 2014.
Ana Podvršič
Putting Compradors on the Test: Toward a Critical Analytical Framework for Considering the Peripherisation of Central-‐Eastern Europe
As Slovenia, for a long time considered as “success story” of post-‐socialist transition, got hit by the current social-‐economic crisis, and government proposed a new privatization program the local left has reframed their debate around the so-‐called comprador bourgeoisie, adopting the dependency theory and World System analysis discourse. Actually, since mid 2000 an important part of left discourse on development of Eastern and Central Europe has adopted those theoretical paradigms to address the issue of economic and political dependency on foreign capital. However, regarding recent political and economic transformations on the global scale we might ask if those paradigms are still pertinent to consider contemporary processes of peripherisation within EU? Premised on the commercial understanding of capitalism could they propose an analysis of those processes from the standpoint and for the working class? Drawn mainly upon recent insights from Marxist theory of development and Marxist theory of the capitalist state a critical engagement with above-‐mentioned approaches is politically necessary and theoretical productive – only an analytical framework that grasp the social mechanisms and
the underlying social logics of the processes of peripherisation within Europe could enable us to articulate political strategy in favor of the international solidarity.
Julia Podziewska
Lost Property: Political Economy and Inheritance
"The on-‐going, global economic crisis has turned attention to the Companies Acts of 1844-‐56. All sides in the contest over this legislation, the foundation of present-‐day corporate governance and company law, drew on novelistic narrative devices. Few literary scholars have observed this: firstly, because the ascendant ‘material culture’ school privileges the tangible object over analysis; secondly, because property transfer in the mid-‐Victorian novel overwhelmingly concerns inheritance rather than finance capital.
Focusing on Wilkie Collins, I argue that this new capital leaves its imprint in the form of complex plots, in narrative flow, on the syntagmatic axis of the novel. It is the ease and pace with which property in the novels passes through numerous unfamiliar hands that connects it with company shares and other alienable forms.
Plot has been overlooked. Earlier emancipatory criticism saw capitalism within depictions of the industrial and urban; recent work informed by identity/recognition politics occludes class relations and property in the mid-‐Victorian novel.
By identifying a new object of enquiry— the inheritance plot—I discern various conceptualisations of property transmission during the mid-‐Victorian period and hence establish more precisely the relationship between the novel and capital."
Gianluca Pozzoni
Between Philosophy and Social Science: Althusser and the Della Volpean Marxism
As his correspondence demonstrates, in the early 1960s Louis Althusser was particularly interested in Italian Marxism, especially in the current led by Galvano Della Volpe. The present paper argues that the Althusserian-‐Della Volpean link is far from a biographical accident. On the contrary, it is firmly rooted in a robust but original reading of Marx's work. In contrast to both the dialectical-‐materialist orthodoxy of traditional and Soviet Marxism and the humanist inclinations of Western Marxism, Althusser's and the Della Volpeans' insistence on the radical difference between Marx and Hegel attests their attempt to detach Marxism from its allegedly Idealist or historicist roots. According to both interpretations, Marx's "rupture" with Hegel's philosophy lays the foundations for his turn to a scientific attitude towards the study of society. In Althusserian and Della Volpean Marxism, "Capital" is very much seen as a work of social science, to prove which both schools resort to comparisons between Marx's method and classic standards of philosophy of science (French epistemology and post-‐Galilean scientific method, respectively). The paper then concludes
by arguing that framing Marxism in modern epistemological terms provided the basis for a fruitful research programme in the social sciences.
Katja Praznik
Artistic autonomy between mystification and emancipation: theorizing cultural labor legislation in postsocialist context
"Drawing on a distinction between culture as ideological production and culture as economic production, this paper will analyze the cultural-‐policy regulation of cultural labor legislation (laws for free-‐lance cultural work) and contradictions of the claims for artistic autonomy that became apparent due to the introduction of new form of cultural work from the 1980s to 2000s in the context of post-‐socialist Slovenia. In this context that exemplifies the transition from socialism to the neoliberal era, the issues of artistic autonomy and the regulation of cultural labor will be analyzed by confronting two theoretical perspectives, spontaneous ideology (Althusser) and fetishism of social relations (Marx, Heinrich). Considering the effects of the new regulation as well as the prevailing commodification of cultural work from these two perspectives, the paper will explicate the process of mystification of economic foundations of cultural production by arguing that cultural producers understand the relative autonomy of art on the level of ideological production as autonomy of their production process. Hence, assertions of the artistic autonomy function as a kind of spontaneous ideology that mystifies the economic relations in the sphere of culture. By focusing on this mystification the paper will furthermore foreground the ideological discursive forms (such as self-‐employed cultural producer, cultural entrepreneur, freelancer) usually attached to assertions of the artistic autonomy in order to question its alleged emancipatory potential during the deconstruction of the welfare state.
Hugo Radice
Class Theory and Class Politics Today
The 2013 BBC survey of the present-‐day British class structure paints a picture of a society fragmented into seven ‘classes’ defined by income, occupation and culture. At the same time, for several decades progressive discourse has counterposed ‘working class politics’ and ‘social movements’ as revolutionary agents. This essay asks whether there remains a ‘working class’ as analysed in Marx’s critique of political economy, and whether as such it has any potential role in building a popular alternative to capitalism.
After briefly reviewing the traditional Marxist view, I examine three major debates on class in the 1960s to 1980s. First, the rise of the ‘new’ middle classes led mainstream sociologists to challenge Marx’s two-‐class model, and the New Left sought to respond to these claims either by positing a ‘third class’, or by reasserting the validity of the old model. Secondly, even if the two-‐class model remained valid at some level, in the context of postwar prosperity and consumerism the reality of working-‐class differentiation directly challenged the left’s faith in the working class as revolutionary agent. Thirdly, ‘non-‐class’ movements challenged forms of oppression based on gender, ethnicity
and sexuality, and thereby also the traditional view that privileged a class politics rooted in capitalist production.
Here I argue for an alternative understanding of production and labour, rooted in Marx’s distinction between abstract labour (in the realm of value) and concrete labour (in the realm of use-‐value). While the former is historically restricted to capitalism, and imprisoned in both its production relations and its ideology, the latter refers to the immanent relation between humanity and nature, which privileges the overall process of social reproduction and transcends that historical restriction. If the historical role of the working class remains the abolition of all classes, it will be founded upon the unity of purpose that underpins concrete labour to meet social needs. The challenge is to develop that unity of purpose into a popular alternative to the rule of money.
Nat Raha
Queer Marxism and the task of contemporary queer social critique
"The successes of mainstream LGBT organisations lobbying governments for civil rights has created a historical moment of enfranchisement and disenfranchisement for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans/transgender, queer) subjects and life in the West. LGBT civil empowerment is juxtaposed with austerity measures and public reforms that have a strong impact across lines of race/immigration status, class, ability and gender.
The concepts of homonormativity (Duggan 2003) and homonationalism (Puar 2007), and recent Marxist interventions into queer theory (e.g. Floyd 2009, Hennessy 2000, Muñoz 2009) have begun to connect the social legitimatisation of queer subjects to issues of class and economic power; however, this paper will argue that this work has yet to sufficiently theorise the normalising function of contemporary forms of capitalist reproduction and accumulation.
Critiquing queer readings of Marx’s labour theory of value (heavily influenced by Spivak 1988), it will consider how the commodity form enables the ‘liberation’ of queer lives and queer labour through the capitalist drive for profit. It will theorise how neoliberalism thrives off difference through the commodification and reproduction of difference via identity, necessarily transforming the qualitative character of queer everyday life – a necessity for capital’s survival."
Vasna Ramasar
Inherited futures: Race and class in water struggles in South Africa
This paper examines the role of processes of accumulation by state apparatus engaged in water service delivery in South Africa and the citizen struggles against this process. The marketization and privatization of water service delivery opened up new territory globally for accumulation through the framing of water as a economic good. Democratic South Africa has been no less affected by a process that has resulted in disempowered communities and led to water shortages, particularly in poor and black communities.
order to grasp better the dynamics of neoliberal expansion and the resulting counter-‐movements in various underdeveloped regions of the Global South.
Heterodox schools such as classical substantivst as well as postcolonial streams exhibit divergent understandings of capital accumulation and capitalist development, which often sit uncomfortably with the Marxist frame of analysis – providing sometimes complementary, sometimes competing justifications for uneven/underdevelopment in the Global periphery. We believe however, that specific intellectual contributions such as Polanyi’s (1944) fundamental notion of the of ‘fictitious commodities’ (relating to land-‐labour-‐and-‐money) along with Sanyal’s (2007) seminal idea of ‘wasteland of capital’ – a condition specific to, and characteristic of, post-‐colonial capitalism, read not in isolation but in consonance, are useful as well as critical concepts for sharpening our understanding of specific processes of neoliberal capitalist accumulation as well as the ensuing tumult at the very margins of global capitalism.
By ensconcing the narrative about the struggle stemming from the land grab by multinational mining corporations in resource-‐rich but abjectly backward tribal regions of Chhattisgarh (India) in the above dynamic neo Marixan-‐heterodox framework, the paper will attempt to tackle the dilemma of how, even with the ostensible presence of severe class antagonism and resistance to structural relations of power at such sites of dispossession, the structural hold of the state-‐corporate capital seems to negotiate and persist over considerable lengths of time."
Gianfranco Rebucini & Gianfranco Rebucini
Thinking the Far-‐right's Hegemonic Project as a Sexual Project: a Critique of Norm-‐Centered Sexual Politics
"In the last decades, criticisms of hetero/homonormativity have provided an original framework of social analysis laying bare the current transformations of social relations of gender and sexualities. In particular, this strand of critique has underlined the crucial link between, on the one hand, an emerging sexual social stratification and, on the other hand, an inclusion of LGB subjectivities into national projects across different European social formations. This 'sexual passive revolution' has been read through both marxist and post-‐structuralist lens. However, we aim to show in this paper that a pervasive reliance to a Foucaldian methodology in the analysis of 'norms' has prevented more political analyses to emerge. In particular, we would argue here that a focus on 'norms' puts too much emphasis on 'lifestyle politics' rather than broader transformative practices pertaining to the social stratification of sexualities.
In order to claim for an alternative approach, more reliant on gramscian concepts of 'hegemony', 'historical bloc' and 'passive revolution', we will focus on the current strategies of the far-‐right in Europe to rebuild a social/political constituency. There is now much
evidence that these attempts have more and more relied on a blurring of the traditional line between 'progressive' and 'reactionary' demands, in particular in the domain of sexualities. However, an inquiry into LGB politics that merely takes into account the normalization of subjectivities, identities and practices obscures the more conjunctural dynamics at stake in current far-‐right victimization of national-‐white queer bodies. We would argue that these attempts reflect a project of undermining antagonisms based on sexuality. This is part of a more general strategy of building a historical bloc through a dual process: obscuring social relations (of sexualities, gender and class) on the one hand, atomizing potential communities of resistance on the other. This boils down to a horizon of strong sexual hierarchies (where heterosexuality remains the main way of organizing production and reproduction) in a social fabric politicized through the rejection of the non-‐white 'Other'. This implies that an exclusive focus on norms entraps left political strategy in a power/resistance game, preventing it to confront emerging sexual/hegemonic projects. We argue instead that left strategies aiming at transforming the sexual organization of production and reproduction, in an expansive dynamic of social alliances, have generally more political purchase and are more conducive to undermining what is nowadays meant by 'homonationalism'."
Tommaso Redolfi Riva
Critique and Presentation: Bailey and Ricardo in Marx's Dialectic of the Form of Value
"Marx’s critique of David Ricardo represents a topic that has often been debated. The same cannot be said of his criticism of Samuel Bailey, which has for a long time remained in the shade. My aim in this paper is not to reconstruct the role of the works of Samuel Bailey and Davis Ricardo in the development of Marx’s critique of political economy from a historical point of view. My aim is rather a theoretical one, that is, to show that Ricardo and Bailey represent two fundamental moments of Marx’s presentation. “Moment” is here used in a non-‐generic sense: what I wish to highlight is that as they are presented in Marx’s critique of political economy, Ricardo’s and Bailey’s theories of value represent two opposite and contradictory sides of the category of value.
After having presented Marx’s critique of Ricardo and Bailey I will try to reflect on the deficiencies of classical and vulgar political economy from a methodological point of view. Finally I intend to trace back the methodological lacks of political economy to the object of political economy itself: I will try to present Ricardo and Bailey’s theories of value as historically determined ways of existence of consciences, “socially valid form of thought”."
José Reis
Ambivalence and gloom on the edge of the Atlantic: the post-‐2008 global crisis in Portugal
The post-‐2008 global financial crisis unleashed a storm not only in the material order but also in the symbolic order. It has shaken the hegemony of neoclassical economics
epistemologically, of neoliberalism politically, while on the cultural realm its impact, more varied across countries and harder to summarise in one term, is nonetheless unmistakable. In the case of Portugal, it is interesting how, despite a wide diversity of discourses in the mass media, bestseller books, through to more academic accounts, the hegemonic cultural appropriation of the crisis that seems to emerge is framed around a particular national essentialism of moral overtones. This kind of negative nationalism mythologises the “people” as a uniform mass who, rather than grand virtues, is instead uniquely beset by grand defects that ultimately are to blame for the crisis and legitimate all subsequent suffering. This nebulous but very operative common sense re-‐invokes images from Portugal’s colonial past, and its particular coloniser/colonised ambivalence, replaced in the post-‐1980s period of European integration for an imagination of the Centre (“we are a developed country”), but not quite suppressed. At the same time, and at least for the time being, it pervades projections of the future in the cultural realm, from media discourse to essay to art, with a dystopian stance. This communication draws on an on-‐going research on how ideas of economic crisis are created and appropriated in economics, politics and culture.
Matthieu Renault & Bronnikova Olga
Bolshevism in Translation: Inter-‐national Communism in the Wake of the October Revolution
A radical upheaval in the heart of the Russian Empire with tremendous effects on the Western capitalist world as a whole, the Soviet Revolution gave rise and/or voice to manifold (national) translations of Bolshevism at the margins (both internal and external) of Russia. Contrary to what one might presume, those various versions of “national communism” (Muslim, East Asian, Jewish, Ukrainian, etc.) were not alienated from each other: at some points, they interacted, intertwined, exchanged their views and shared their experiences. Given the deep heterogeneity of the margins (okrainy) these national communisms originated from (in geographical, cultural and political terms), their dialogue – far from merely relying on common remnants of nationalism inside the healthy body of internationalism – involved a complex process of mutual (re)translations of Bolchevism; in other words, it implied the construction of an inter-‐national communism, which remains to be examined. To begin with, this paper focuses on Mirsaid Sultan Galiev’s Muslim national communism and explores three interrelated issues: 1) Sultan-‐Galiev’s activities at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) during the early 1920s – especially his relations with Asian communists (Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Vietnamese); 2) The critical attitude of non-‐“Russian” communists (such as Mykola Skrypnik from Ukraine) towards Sultan-‐Galiev’s first arrest in May 1923; 3) The ideological connections between Muslim communism and the older Jewish Labour Bund.
Paul Reynolds
The Lure of Agency and subjectivity: Reflecting on Hall and Laclau and the problem of agency and practice in Marxist theory
With the passing of Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau there has been a wave of interest in putting their work in perspective. In this paper I want to explore critically a common if differentiated problem that Hall and Laclau represent within the context of the post-‐Marxist engagements with Marxism: The lure of agency and subjectivity. Both thinker in different ways expanded the possibilities of agency and subjectivity within a structurally and socially conceived analysis of the social relations of production within the materialist conception of history. What both accounts did was to widen the conceptual space for agency within social and cultural context and privilege the subjective engagement with social contexts and conjunctures. In doing so, they allowed new possibilities for a more fluid, plastic, culturally discursive and phenomenologically conceived development within Marxist theory which in turn encouraged an inclusive and more reformist politics. Whilst this offered possibilities that revivified Marxist theory, it failed to grasp a crucial problem -‐ the lure of agency and subjectivity discursively constituted failed to account for the problem of determinations and hegemonic power, which were dismissed rather than engaged with. The proper terrain for the meeting of agency and subjectivity -‐ and for an accounting of its import beyond its seductive lure, is in a concept of practice that recognizes precisely the materiality of human subjectivity in context and conjuncture as constituting definite determinant structures. This paper will describe the terms of this terrain and seek to articulate some of the problem it raises for Marxists in both accounting for agency and subjectivity in their proper place and recognizing the real problems of building of revolutionary movement and politics
Bruce Robinson
Marx’s Categories of Labour, Value Production and Digital Work
"This presentation will outline some of Marx’s categories of labour and use them as a basis for categorising digital work. In particular, the pairings of living and dead labour, waged and unwaged labour, productive and unproductive labour and labour subsumed by capital versus free labour enable us to identify those forms of digital production that create value, those that are unproductive in Marx’s sense, those that remain outside the control of capital and those that do not require human labour. This enables us, for example, to challenge the analysis that users of Google and Facebook produce surplus value.
We will present the underlying arguments that not all labour produces value, that there is an important distinction between activities that create value and those that reduce costs for capital, and that some online activities are effectively automated. This entails a critique of three schools of critical analysis – the post-‐operaismo of Negri and others, autonomists such as Harvie, and the Fuchs-‐Smythe analysis of online labour – which share a rejection of Marx’s theory of productive and unproductive labour."
Jen Roesch
Mechanisms of Dependency, Control and Appropriation: The State and Sexual Violence in the US
"Sexual violence is often analyzed and discussed as being the product of a “rape culture”. But such violence has been endemic to and intimately entwined with the history of capitalism in the United States. Cultural constructions and popular understandings of sexual and gender-‐based violence have shifted in different historical periods -‐ in relation both to developments within capitalism and in response to struggles. The state has played a central role in organizing the response to such violence as well as these popular understandings. It has consistently done so in ways that continue to reinforce and reproduce women’s dependency and second-‐class citizenship. Moreover, state responses have frequently strengthened other repressive and oppressive aspects of American capitalism – most centrally racism.
This paper will examine this role as well as the contradictory relationship of many of the movements against sexual violence to it. Paradoxically, many of the reforms advocated and won by the feminist movement have helped to strengthen institutions and social relations that increase the marginalization and dependency of women – particularly working class women and women of color. I will situate the persistence, and current intensification, of violence within this history and relationship."
Graciela Romero
The peasants' struggle for food sovereignty
"The peasants' struggle for the realisation of the food sovereignty framework, as championed by the peasants' movement La Via Campesina, has crucial implications not only for the structural economic and social transformations that it proposes but also for the way in which the peasantry is organised as agents of social transformation. In this paper, I attempt to present the food sovereignty as a paradigm that deconstructs the capitalist mode of production and access and use of natural resources and at the same time seeks the fundamental reconfiguration of political power relationships in society. In addition it highlights the role of the peasants' movement in linking up local and global struggles to bring down the transnational accumulation of capital.
I will use the class-‐gender-‐race intersectionality perspective to argue that the way of organising and mobilising the peasantry in the pursuit of food sovereignty, determines to a great extent how fundamentally deep rooted capitalist and patriarchal values can be transformed. The analysis will be based on the theoretical framework and praxis of La Via Campesina’s members and other peasant and civil society networks across the world. I will also present the Cuban case, a state led approach to food sovereignty, in order to draw comparisons and perspectives for the future."
Eduardo Romero Dianderas
Indigenous labor, ethnicity and capital accumulation in the margins of the State: the case of timber industry networks in Peruvian Amazonia
"In this presentation I offer an economic, political and historical account on how extractive capitalism has expanded and reproduced in the context of the Peruvian Amazon lowlands. First, I outline the main challenges that extractive industries faced in the context of early capitalist expansive cycles in Amazonia during the late 19th Century. Particularly, I focus on the way that labor scarcity and the absence of a regional workforce were thought of by emergent regional elites and entrepreneurs during the early State attempts to articulate a regional space in Amazonia. I associate these reflections with the marginal character historically attributed to Amazonian territories, which have been from thereon represented as “boundary” spaces with anomalous economic and political characteristics.
Secondly, I offer a description of how this context informed the development of a body of non wage-‐based labor appropriation strategies that dynamically combined seduction and violence in order to expand available workforce among indigenous populations of Amazonia. I argue that during this timeframe a well-‐established body of informal labor appropriation strategies came to be and proved a certain “exploitative” efficacy in articulating indigenous workforce to international commodity chains. The emergence of these labor appropriation strategies had the double effect of expanding the material flows of extractive capitalism over extensive and remote areas of the tropical rainforest, while at the same time changing the way that forests, market agents and commodities related to the production of new indigenous subjectivities and economic habits.
Thirdly, I turn to present time in order examine how these labor appropriation strategies have evolved throughout time and how they allow for particular forms of capital accumulation processes in contemporary Peruvian Amazonia. Drawing on some recent ethnographic and quantitative data, I offer a description of how racialized exchanges, marginal processes of statemaking and commercial international pressures intersect in specific local settings of the Peruvian rainforest in order to make possible the production of value and the accumulation of extractive capital at a regional scale. Finally, I discuss how these analytics can produce interesting elements for considering how localized capitalist projects, the production of non wage-‐based labor subjectivities, and tropical rainforests come to be in the margins of contemporary South American States.
John Rose
Lenin Luxemburg War & Revolution: Lenin's criticism of Luxemburg's anti-‐war Junius pamphlet
"Luxemburg’s first world war Junius pamphlet, written in prison, was arguably the greatest anti war statement of the last century. Its haunting theme, Socialism or Barbarism, prophetically cast its shadow over the last century and continues to do so now.
Junius was also uncompromising in its hostility to Kautsky’s pro-‐war German Socialist Party, the SPD, still claiming to be a Marxist party, with a majority in the German parliament.
Yet Lenin, whilst recognising it was written by an outstanding comrade in the revolutionary socialist tradition, (he didn’t know RL was the author), was uneasy about Junius. (Collected Works Volume 22, pages 305-‐319, http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/junius-‐pamphlet.htm).
Critically, he challenges the failure to break organisationally with Kautsky.
This captured a fundamental Marxist principle uniquely developed by Lenin. “Politics cannot be separated mechanically from organisation.” Junius risked failure by not giving distinct organisational expression to the politics of its powerful anti war sentiment.
Kautsky had claimed the party had to respond to the intensely patriotic mood that had swept through the workers movement. Lenin had already dismissed this as “treachery”, in 'The Collapse of the Second International'."
Catherine Rottenberg
Neoliberal Feminist Manifestos and the Entrenchment of an Imperialist Logic
A new trend is on the rise: increasingly, high-‐powered women in the US are publicly espousing feminism. One has only to think of Anne Marie Slaughter's "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" that appeared in the Atlantic in July 2012 and became the most widely read article in the magazine's history. Then, in March 2013, Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In hit the shelves and instantly became a New York Times' best-‐seller. In this paper I suggest that both Sandberg's and Slaughter's "feminist manifestos" should be understood as symptomatic of a larger cultural phenomenon in which liberal feminism is becoming the site for its own displacement. Concentrating on their shifting discursive registers, I propose that these texts can give us insight into the particular ways in which the husk of liberalism is being mobilized to spawn a neoliberal feminism as well as a new feminist subject. While this emerging form of feminism can be understood as yet another domain neoliberalism has colonized by producing its own variant, I suggest that it simultaneously serves a particular cultural purpose: it hollows out the potential of mainstream liberal feminism to underscore the constitutive contradictions of liberal democracy, and, in this way, further entrenches neoliberal rationality and an imperialist logic.
Shahnaz Rouse
Precarity and/or the new ‘normal’? in Pakistan: Neoliberalization, gendered labor regimes and informalization
"Since the eighties, there has been increasingly attention paid to the informal sector both in the advanced capitalist countries as well as in many parts of the global south. De Soto’s now well known work, The Other Path, published in 1989, brought this to phenomena into the mainstream, as a major component of peripheral economies. Written at a moment when the Fujimoro regime in Peru was committed to privatization in Peru, and to retrenchment of the state sector, De Soto and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, made virtue out of necessity, and sought to push for laws that would bring the informal sector under the ambit of the state. The motivation was both political and economic. De Soto’s formulation has since dominated conventional political analyses in the U.S. whereby informality and criminality are conflated with each other. This perspective has allowed for ever greater degrees of policing and surveillance of marginalized populations, and increased incarceration of the poor, and communities of color.
Saskia Sassen’s work on globalization, coming almost ten years after De Soto’s, also emphasizes the increasing incidence of informalization, but in a vastly different register: she argues that this sector’s expansion is not only an issue confronting peripheral economies, but a rapidly growing element within advanced economies. She situates this development squarely within the ambit of late capitalism, and argues that the ascendance of finance capital in today’s marketized global economy are its driving force. In many ways, her theorization of the contemporary turn to informalization echoes classic Marxist understandings of the workings of capital and the structural tendency within capitalism to render labor increasingly redundant, and pushing such labor into ‘flexible’ and casual labor regimes.
While Sassen’s work provides a useful and necessary corrective to De Soto’s earlier treatment of informalization, it is pitched at a level of generalization that demands greater attentiveness to local conditions under which such informalization takes place within specific histories of spaces within the global south itself. This is where a close reading of the Pakistani context is insightful: based on studies conducted by scholar-‐activists within Pakistan, I hope to demonstrate the relationship between the state, international regimes (both multilateral and economic), and local forces. Through a carefully periodized and space specific analysis, I hope to explicate the centrality of gender to contemporary informalization (as many of the sources I draw upon suggest), but also to problematize certain assumptions between work and women’s emancipation, between productive and unproductive labor, production and social reproduction, and conclude with strategies to address this current political-‐economic turn. While specific to Pakistan, my expectation is that this paper will provoke a necessary and much needed discussion on effective strategies designed to further labor struggles, as well as subject our own modes of categorization to a more critical scrutiny."
Camilla Royle
The production of nature and the new materialist turn
In Uneven Development, Neil Smith put forward the notion of the production of nature. The work is an engaging critique of dualist accounts of nature that see it as either an untouched wilderness to be preserved at the expense of human development or an externality to be factored in (or not) to capitalist markets. Smith, following Marx, started from the position that humanity and nature are a unity and attempted to understand the material practices that led them to be thought of as separate realms. But, further than this, Smith argued that humans produce all of the ""nature"" that we see around us—that there is no real nature beyond human societies. However, this unapologetically anthropocentric stance raised the hackles of many green thinkers. Even William Cronon’s essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness”, written in the same vein as Smith’s work, concludes that there are positives associated with wilderness landscapes, arguing that we should “recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we did not create”. More recently, the rise of the “new” materialism has tried to account for the material properties and capacities of non-‐human organisms and objects. Does this renewed engagement with the actions of things as well as those of humans present an insurmountable challenge to the production of nature thesis? Can nature be both produced and have its own agency? What are the prospects for environmental politics of the change in focus towards the non-‐human?-‐-‐-‐-‐
Bue Rübner Hansen
Organising need and desire
"Since Deleuze and Guattari's damning critique of Sartre's anthropology of scarcity in the Anti-‐Oedipus, a long tradition of desire-‐based politics were inaugurated, generally dismissing the importance of needs in the age of post-‐fordist hyperproductivity. Today, after the golden post-‐war years, and the debt fuelled speculative 2000s (and always in the necropolitical post-‐colonial world), the limitations of attempts to push a growing and gluttonously need-‐satisfying capitalism beyond itself are apparent. Today there is a sense that large populations are entering a zero-‐sum game in which scarcity, lack and need gain primacy over abundance, excess and desire.
Marx's Capital provides a powerful framework for understanding the capitalist production of needs and commodification of objects of desires, but it does little to help us think the implications of need and desire as subjective operators for class composition and organisation, in relation to resistant and revolutionary practices. Perhaps for this reason Marxists have thought organisation starting from class consciousness of objective relations, and seen need and desire as something to be overcome.
This paper will proceed through a rereading of Marx's remarks on base and superstructure, in order to strategically insert desire and need at a central nodal point in Marxist theory.
The Revolutionary Subject: Marx, Menchú, Payeras
"The relevance and vitality of Marx’s thought rest on its opening towards alterity and alterity’s revolutionary possibilities. Marx’s work on corporeality, estrangement, and living labor are points of departure for a conception of a transformative and revolutionary subject under conditions of crisis throughout “Empire”—conditions that close off more and more paths and tend to leave us with two possibilities: Revolution or fascism.
In this presentation I examine three significant concepts of the revolutionary subject: First,
"The 2011 Egyptian uprising constituted a momentous event in modern Egyptian history. The uprising can be theorized as a response to the neoliberal project that had come to dominate Egypt through the policies of the ruling class. However, three years on it appears that the while the configuration of social forces within the ruling class may have shifted, neoliberalism continues to dominate the Egyptian political economy.
The first part of this paper attempts a historical genealogy of the Egyptian ruling class since 1952. Through using Gramscian and neo-‐Gramscian concepts this paper shows that since 2011 specific actors within the Egyptian ruling class—conceptualized as fractions of capital—have attempted to reconfigure the ruling class without changing dominant forms of capitalist accumulation, as well as to show how the ruling class created the conditions that produced the uprising itself.
However it would be a mistake to ignore the resistance on the part of subaltern groups. The ruling class is constantly in a complex relationship with the subaltern classes. Specific communities within the category of the subaltern challenge and subvert hegemony. The second part of this paper will thus trace the different fractions of labour that represent these challenges to neoliberal capital. Through an analysis of both the fractions of capital and labour, the paper attempts to show why neoliberal capitalism continues to dominate Egypt as well as why this domination is not hegemonic."
Sune Sandbeck
Uneven and Combined Development and the Sovereign Spaces of Offshore Finance
The revival of the historical materialist concept of uneven and combined development (U&CD) within the field of International Relations has refocused attention on the importance of examining the interaction between different tempos of development across space and time. What has emerged from these discussions is a theoretical appreciation of the contingent, multilinear and interactive trajectories of capitalist state formation across a global spatial terrain riven by social, economic, and geographical unevenness. The proliferation of offshore financial centres (OFCs) in the past few decades is a subject that has tended to fall outside the purview of these debates and the present paper suggests that the framework of U&CD sheds considerable light on the contingent historical context out of which OFCs emerged. However, the growing significance of offshore finance to the global economy has altered the very meaning of unevenness by rapidly shifting the spatial contours and possibilities of capitalist accumulation, requiring a continual rearticulation of sovereign power. The particular manner in which offshore finance intensifies some of the central contradictions of capitalism forces us to rethink the spatial scope of U&CD and I examine how a revised conceptualization might enhance our understanding of the relationship between state sovereignty and capitalist accumulation.
Nikil Saval
White Collar Work, Space, and Class
"Since the consolidation of large industries in the late 19th century and advances in the techniques and function of bureaucracy in the private sector, the rise in the number of so-‐called “white collar” workers has been a continual source of controversy for Marxist analysis. For an orthodox or vulgar Marxism that held fast to a prediction of increasing class polarization, the apparent class complexity of fin de siecle capitalism proved to be divisive in its own way, leading no small part to the “revisionist” controversies and fractiousness of the early 20th century.
The old argument over the class basis of the white collar worker has repeated itself at critical moments over the history of Marxist thought, particularly at moments of theoretical and organizational crisis, with partisans of some version of a proletarianization thesis, often finding themselves arrayed against thinkers who find the middle class an undeniable fact, with many of the latter often finding themselves making a quick exit from Marxism altogether. Regardless of camp, the white collar worker has proved an enduring problem for Marxist class analysis; the endurance of the individualist, meritocratic white collar worker has often been cited as one of the central barriers to viable socialist politics, certainly in the United States.
Rather than attempting to solve this problematic directly—one of the more intractable problems in social theory—my paper will attempt to tackle the issue from a different angle, by placing it in a spatial and geographic context. The history of white collar work discloses the repeated attempts by capital to enhance the technical division of labor within firms through an ever more refined spatial separation, increasing the sense of class complexity and division within the white collar strata. What effect these forms of separation might have had on a sense of class consciousness, or class awareness (to use Giddens’ term) will be the guiding question of the paper.
Tracing the development of the office interior from the mid-‐19th century countinghouses of the UK and the US, I hope to show how the adoption of bureaucracy and the application of scientific management had the effect of proletarianizing sections of the workforce—particularly the typing or steno pool, largely composed of women—while dramatizing the white collar workplace as a systematically apportioned reflection of a legitimated hierarchy: the serried, orthogonal central desks occupying the “factory”-‐like settings of the typing pool versus the articulated regime of status progressing along the private offices of the corridor; and finally the separation of the executive suite from the lower floors. I will examine these alongside management texts that make explicit the importance of the well-‐designed office for maintaining an individualist ethos.
Similarly the separation of spaces of manual and nonmanual labor has often been pushed through to separate the traditional homes of labor unrest from its less agitated deskbound denizens. Here I will discuss the history of Chicago planning; the emergence of
the New York regional plan; and the separation of the suburban campus setting, which gave rise to the discourse of the knowledge worker.
Finally I will discuss contemporary conditions of mass disaggregation, at the same time that pervasive casualization has brought talk of a “new proletariat,” or “precariat,” among the declassed white collar worker, as a source of a renewal of social protest. I will examine these claims alongside the spatial effects of disaggregation within white collar workforces, with many of the “factory”-‐like settings displaced to global south countries, where they in turn occupy higher levels of status. I will conclude with some reflections on the current relationship between of space and the “middle class.”"
Tina Schivatcheva
Accidental hegemon? Exporting the core chimera -‐ ‘Modell Deutschland’ in the Eastern European periphery
Reunification has turned Germany into a central actor, and then the central actor in determining European affairs. Meanwhile in the Eastern European periphery, Germany has become the indisputable economic hegemon. The discussion uses neo-‐Gramscian analysis, cultural political economy and Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) perspectives to analyse the current trade and socio-‐economic relations of Germany, Ukraine and Bulgaria
Characteristic of the socio-‐political and socio-‐economic transformation of Eastern Europe is that by the early 2000s the whole region had adopted the standards and institutional underpinnings of economic freedom and openness usual in Western market economies. Bulgaria and Ukraine have been characterized as Liberal Market Economies (LMEs), which differ in their achieved levels of liberalisation, privatisation, and market-‐oriented institution building. Meanwhile Germany, the paradigmatic Coordinated Market Economy (CME) and the birthplace of the tripartist ‘Modell Deutschland’ has progressively strengthened its economic presence in Eastern Europe. German economy (GDP 3.5 trillion) towers above the economies of Bulgaria and Ukraine. For more than 10 years both Bulgaria and Ukraine have held negative trade balances with the Bundesrepublik, amounting to the joint total sum of approximately 56 billion dollars cumulative profits (UNCOMTRADE). Both Ukraine and Bulgaria have been consumers of German industrial goods and exporters of low value-‐added products. Yet in spite of the decadal-‐long trade asymmetries in favour of Germany, there have been only a token of complaints about the paucity of German FDI.
Germany's current role goes beyond economically 'influencing' the region. A traditional realist/neorealist definition prescribes hegemony as 'the holding by one state of a preponderance of power in the international systems, so that it can single-‐handedly dominate the rules and arrangements by which international political and economic relations are conducted.' However, modern Germany projects its power not via military force or direct control, but by indirect control of the rules and agendas (hegemony). A
discussion on the nature of hegemony should also take into consideration Gramsci's analyses, in which he emphasizes the importance of the voluntaristic aspect of hegemony, distinguishing between 'domination' (coercion, power) and 'hegemony' (ideas, persuasion, consensus). More recently, Ikenberry and Kupchan explore the relationship between power and socialization as complementary components of hegemony. They elaborate that 'socialization' serves as an 'effective instrument of hegemonic power during critical historical periods in which international change coincides with domestic crises in secondary states.' Thus, although a preponderance of power in material (economic) instruments may facilitate the initial socialization, in the long run it also requires non-‐material instruments, such as ideas, norms, and values.
The analysis argues that the post-‐socialist transition of Bulgaria and Ukraine has not resulted in competitive and innovative market economies, but in a loss of economic, social and human capital. Chronic political and economic instability has increased the social acceptability of the CME model, considered to represent Germany, and consequently German prestige in Eastern Europe. Thus, Germany has been endowed with the exemplary able tutor and Ukraine and Bulgaria -‐ the pupils. ‘Modell Deutschland’ ‘made in’ Bulgaria and Ukraine is associated with the desirable qualities of stability and incrementalism, innovations and good management practices. This idealized representation has failed to distinguish the complexities of the socio-‐economic development within Germany. Thus, while being eroded within Germany ‘Modell Deustchland’ is still attractive in Eastern Europe. Capturing the public imagination of the Eastern European periphery, the chimera of the Rhenish model has been the most successful German ‘export.’"
Louis-‐Georges Schwartz
From Use Time To Use Value And Back?
Instead of asking what comes after the commodity form, my paper asks whether one can imagine a society without property and what conditions would be necessary for such a society. A society without property would mean a society without exchange as we know it, and wherein production and reproduction would be identical. Such a society might realize the dream of living without an economy. In The Highest Poverty, Giorgio Agamben describes early Franciscan monastics as a quasi-‐autonomous social segment fitting this description. The Franciscan vows involve renouncing both private and collective property. As the Catholic Church regulated and subjugated the monastics, they had to confront the problem of the Franciscan vow: how was it possible for Monks to eat if they did not own their food? Does not digestion constitute the very essence of appropriation? At a given moment in the debates the Church arrives at the conclusion that use without possession is conceivable if use can be understood as a mode of time. This notion of use is central to Tiqqun’s notion of a communal form of life that organizes itself as a struggle against capital. Tiqqun’s fighting commune is usually understood as idealism by historical materialists, but my paper attempts, via the methods of Political Marxism to place that conclusion in the context of the
material conditions leading to the production of monks as populations unnecessary to the reproduction of the rest of feudal society, and to ask under what conditions the enjoyment of activity’s products could emerge as a temporal mode rather than a use value within or after the continuous crisis of capitalism.
Richard Seymour
The Austerity State "It is too often glibly assumed that austerity is a project for ‘downsizing the state’.
This ideologeme is linked to a series of claims about the state in the neoliberal era, including above all the claim that the state has been ‘withdrawing’ from the economy. That ideologeme is misplaced. This paper will argue that, while ‘spending cuts’ and public sector firings are the means through which the objectives of austerity are achieved, and while there are rational reasons for capitalist states to reduce the burden of expenditures, the long-‐term effects of austerity involve redeploying state apparatuses rather than reducing their size. Using the examples of past austerity projects, and in the light of Poulantzian state theory, this paper will argue that:
The state under austerity is neither reducing its scope nor ‘withdrawing’ from the economy, but is rather changing the character and mode of its extensive involvement in productive relations.
The state’s cost-‐cutting commitments are real, but are subordinate to its crisis-‐management commitments. This in practice tends to mean that opportunities for cost-‐cutting are limited by the constant need for the state to assimilate and process the crisis tendencies in the economy. Austerity is a response to capitalist crisis, and as such is part of a project which demands more state ‘intervention’ rather than less.
State institutions act within a context of class and political struggles, and must register the strengths of opposing sides in these struggles. This does not mean that the state simply tallies the balance of forces on either side at any given moment. It has its own resistant materiality, itself the result of accumulated outcomes of previous class and political struggles. It possesses a certain ‘selectivity’ in favour of particular strategies as a result of this, and this determines the forms that crisis management can take.
The specific form of crisis management, known as austerity, must be understood in terms of the particular coalition of classes and class fractions that dominates the state apparatuses -‐ the ‘power bloc’. One effect of austerity is precisely to reorganise this power bloc to the benefit of ascendant or already incumbent class fractions.
The relationship between a state and the society which it organises is permanently characterised by dysfunction and disequilibrium. This means that no simple ‘functionalist’ reading of austerity is possible, as it is by no means clear that everything the state does can
be understood as functional to accumulation or legitimation. It also means that each resolution of crisis that it achieves is partial and provisional, and that each solution is likely to contain pathologies of its own. This paper will conclude by discussing the ongoing elements of crisis, both generic and conjunctural, in the austerity state."
Stefano Sgambati
Leveraging equity, securitising debts: the significance of modern banking in the making of financialisation
"The current debate on financialisation is changing our understanding of class and class struggle (Bryan, Rafferty and Martin 2009), as social property relations are being progressively re-‐conceptualized in terms of debt relations (Ingham 2004, 2008). This said, it is not really clear who in the age of financialisation is indebted to whom and how this affects the construction of power relations. Financialisation in effect signals the ‘stabilisation’ of a capitalist regime characterised by the systematic commodification of debt relations, a growth ‘out of measure’ of profit-‐yielding financial instruments, endemic speculation, financial bubbles (Knafo 2012; Hudson 2012): in such a regime nobody is a genuine creditor because in principle every proprietor – and especially the financier -‐ is indebted to everybody else via a capillary infrastructure of liquid financial relations encompassing states and markets altogether.
To get a better sense of how class struggle is articulated in such a context of institutional over-‐indebtedness, the paper aims to outline a brief phenomenology of the ‘negotiation of value’ that is at the basis of modern banking. The latter is conventionally understood as a centralized form of cash intermediation, portfolio management and credit-‐debt bookkeeping. Moving from a monetary understanding, the paper by contrast examines modern banking as the institutionalisation of debt intermediation and the construction of modern money as liquidity. That is to say, far from mediating savings, modern banking is from principle involved with the creation of money 'out of nothing' – in fact, with the articulation of a monetary system of borrowing and lending capable of producing net worth, and based upon a combination of asset and liability management involving respectively leverage and securitisation.
The paper thus examines the rise of English banking in the second half of the seventeenth century. More specifically it focuses on: (a) the financial revolution initiated by goldsmith bankers, as based on bank leverage (performed via bill discounting); (b) the monetary revolution carried by the Bank of England during the eighteenth century, as connected to the securitisation of the English national debt and the emergence of a liquid secondary market for public securities (Amato and Fantacci 2012). Hence, without denying the specificities of the current situation, the paper argues that to grasp the significance of contemporary financialisation we must nonetheless reconsider the very historical foundations of capitalism, and in particular the role of modern banking in the production of
value, because it is only from there that we can glance at the shining skyline of its tottering towers and discover what lies today in their shadow.
Nizan Shaked
Capitalist Institutions/Leftist Art
Emblematic of the modern age, museums are at the political crossroads of wealth and the public. Modeled after its European predecessor, the American museum “perfected” the former’s reformist thrust by using a hybrid private-‐public non-‐profit administrative structure, where institutional governance has regularly been steered by boards comprised of the upper echelon. Artists in the United States have, since the late 1960s, recognized museums as a stage where a political drama is suspended in the cultural and financial tensions between themselves and their work, professional personnel (directors or curators), and the museum board with its oversight capacities. A peculiar line of communication opened between artists and the wealthy, and this paper will look at key examples of works that spoke directly to or about patronage. Universities—also spaces where barons and boosters purport to share a culture with intellectuals, where conservative administration meets progressive faculty and students (perhaps even revolutionary on occasion)—differ from museums in that the dialogue with wealth in the museum is triangulated by a third entity: the public as audience. This paper will discuss works staged with the public in mind by Guerrilla Art Action Group, Daniel J. Martinez, and Andrea Fraser. I will consider them within the contexts of the brief yet significant forming of the Art Worker’s Coalition in the late 1960s as a reformist position of resistance, the efficacy of which was debated by critics and artists such as Les Levine and Mel Ramsden (of Art & Language), who sought a more revolutionary redefinition of art. The idea that art could intervene into the means of production was subsequently seen as naïve at best, after all, the entire field is always already super-‐structural. But since museums can offer insight into the life cycle of case cultural transactions, we can also observe its political and economic implications vis-‐à-‐vis the public. I will ground this perspective in a work by Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll (1970), staged to engage the pubic in a question about Nelson Rockefeller (then Governor of New York State) in a museum founded and governed by members of the Rockefeller family, and the dialogue it elicited between the museum board (specifically David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank) and its administration. Disrupting the liberal façade the museum would rather foreground, Haacke’s work showed how politics and money are “related,” unmasking the resemblance of NY to an oligarchy in hopes to point out a speculative road-‐map to its demise. Being pragmatic, I also track the process by which museums have contained such resistance, and how artists then responded in return, culminating with Andrea Fraser’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial in 2012 titled Le 1% C’est Moi. Rather than revolutionizing art itself, or hitching it to serve the revolution, these artists aimed their interventions to question what ideology does the institutional structure serve and why it is that the public tolerates it.
Divya Sharma
‘Metabolic Rift’ and Resistance: Political Ecology in colonial and post-‐colonial Punjab, India
"This paper will focus on conceptualisations that build on the Marxian concept of ‘metabolic rift’ (cf. Foster, 1999; Moore, 2011; McMichael and Schneider, 2010), to examine how an ecological lens helps rethink the Marxist conception of ‘political agency’. I argue that the framework of ‘metabolic rift’ provides a way of understanding how alienation effected through the separation of labour from the production of knowledge, or the division of mental and menial labour, shapes the articulation of resistance, by tracing the changing form of agrarian struggles and the landscape of rural resistance in the Indian state of Punjab through the colonial and post-‐colonial period. Technological interventions have been employed as a way of reorganizing agrarian production and rural life in Punjab by the colonial and the post-‐colonial state, exemplified by the establishment of the canal system by the British in the late nineteenth century, and the ‘Green Revolution’ in the 1960s. Today, the agrarian crisis in Punjab is being articulated by farmers in a way that signals that ecological viability is contingent on restructuring unequal social relations of production. In this context, I suggest that an analytic focus on how the changes in the production process and the practices of work are experienced, in conjunction with the social relations, in which they are embedded, is significant for understanding the forms in which resistance is articulated. It also provides a theoretical framework for understanding both the rift in and the reconstitution of socio-‐ecological relations historically and experientially.
Stuart Shields
The time for reform is always now: The European Bank for Reconstruction & Development and the renewal of neoliberalisation in Central Eastern Europe after the financial "crisis”.
The paper interrogates the role of the EBRD in the refinement of neoliberal strategies in post-‐communist transition. By drawing upon a Gramscian critical political economy approach, the paper argues that the EBRD has promoted the deepening commodification of post-‐communist social relations through the diffusion of ideas centred round three successive waves of neoliberalisation in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). The EBRD has taken advantage of a series of crises to redefine the relationship between national state and regional and international institutions, to accelerate the closure of divergent paths to development: the first based on market construction from the early 1990s, a second based on reconfiguring institutional arrangements in CEE associated with European Union (EU) accession, and third, the neoliberal promotion of competitiveness after EU membership. The paper contends that the EBRD’s strategies for neoliberalisation have shifted again in response to the current crisis, and thus a fourth wave of neoliberalisation is emerging following the North Atlantic financial crisis. This latest wave of neoliberalisation evident in recent EBRD material prompts CEE to discover sources of growth less sensitive to changes in the external environment: households and individuals.
Jonathan Short
Benjamin and De-‐Vitalized Life: Notes on Politics
In this presentation I situate Benjamin’s conception of historical memory, as elucidated through the theory of translation, relative to the dire state of contemporary politics under neo-‐liberalism. This discussion of Benjamin seeks to connect his thought to a reading developed by Frank Ruda (2009) of the young Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 as a way of thinking politics internal to and the overcoming of the historical production of a generic and universal human essence in necessarily alienated form. Not only does my reading of Benjamin in this context show quite clearly the difference between Benjamin and Heidegger on the status of historical time, but it also intervenes in the present political moment by rejecting contemporary vitalist accounts of philosophical anthropology. If contemporary vitalism in its various guises asserts a generic human essence, it does so in an “infra-‐political” manner (Bosteels 2011), that is, as a substitute for, and implicit regulation of, political action itself. In Benjamin’s thought, like that of the early Marx, we find a philosophical anthropology predicated on humanity as generic historical being for whom memory of enslavement and dispossession—in short, essential estrangement, turns awareness of devitalized (alienated) lives toward revolutionary politics.
Rick Simon
Russia, Ukraine, and the ‘new’ Imperialism
This paper will explore the current (at the time of writing) crisis in Ukraine from the perspective of the ‘new’ imperialism associated, in particular, with David Harvey. It will argue that Russia’s motivations in relation to Ukraine must be analysed from the perspective of two dialectically inter-‐woven ‘logics’: territorialism and capital accumulation. In respect of the former, the collapse of the Soviet Union replaced an integrated economic space, in which Russian cultural, linguistic and military domination had been entrenched, with a patchwork quilt of states, most of which had not previously enjoyed independent statehood and in which there exist significant ethnic Russian minorities. The prospect of US aid to support Russia’s transformation in the 1990s has been replaced by the spectre of a US-‐led NATO at the borders of the Russian Federation and a new ‘containment’ of a weakened Russia by a hegemonic US. In respect of capital accumulation, Russia did not undergo a transformation to a capitalist economy in the manner foreseen by many Western experts but instead underwent a passive revolution in which elements of the Soviet system have been reproduced and intertwined with new capitalist features generated by Russia’s integration into the global economy. In the absence of a strong capitalist class developing productive capacity, such integration has been through the medium of Russia’s natural resource base. The combination of constant US/EU pressure on Russia’s periphery combined with a concern over control of Russia’s key assets in a deteriorating economic situation in
which domestic opposition is growing have prompted Russia’s actions, first in Georgia, and now in Ukraine.
John Smith
Resource extraction, production outsourcing and the new divisions of labour in the global economy
This paper locates resource-‐extraction within the broader context of proliferating global value chains, in which ‘lead firms’ (MNCs headquartered in imperialist countries) outsource production to low-‐wage countries, thereby siphoning surplus value extracted from super-‐exploited workers which reappears as ‘value-‐added’ arising from their own branding and retailing activities. It examines why the increasingly favoured ‘arm’s length’ relationships seen in production, i.e. the processing of raw materials into finished goods, are not seen in the extractive industries, where giant mining firms strive to maintain ownership and control over natural resources and their extraction. It argues that resource-‐extraction and production outsourcing are two essentially complementary forms of imperialist exploitation, a ‘division of labour’ between different f(r)actions of imperialist capital whose profits increasingly depend upon the suppression of working people and the subversion of national sovereignty in so-‐called emerging nations.
Murray Smith
Toward a Marxist Phoenix: The Case for a 21st-‐Century Scientific Socialism
The ability of global capitalism to weather so well the financial crisis and great recession of 2007-‐09, and the palpable inability of socialists to extend their influence significantly in the face of so severe a systemic crisis, has been viewed as an enigma by many on the left. An adequate explanation of this 'enigma' calls for an exploration of three inter-‐related issues: the long-‐standing and deep-‐going damage done by Stalinism to the Marxist-‐socialist project; the persistent hegemony of 'utopian-‐reformist' conceptions on the contemporary radical left; and the acute crisis of leadership that continues to afflict the international working class. This paper explores these issues by summarizing and extending some of the principal arguments presented in 'Marxist Phoenix' (2014) by Murray E.G. Smith, concerning the theoretical and practical prerequisites for the revival of 'scientific socialism' as the indispensable foundation of an insurgent 21st-‐century socialist movement.
Stuart Smithers
“Mimesis and Magic: Breaking the Spell of Self-‐Forgetfulness and Reification in Adorno and Benjamin”
"In his 1938 letter to Benjamin, Adorno laments the omission of theory in certain aspects of the Arcades study, suggesting: “If one wished to put it very drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched. Only theory could break the spell…”
Adorno’s warning reminds us not only of the centrality of the commodity form in Marxist thought, but also the critique of capital as a medium and matrix for the overlapping, blending, intersecting, mystifying and often bewitching forms of commodity, fetishism, reification, and objectification. While both authors discuss magic and mimesis with the hope of liberating the modern subject from arrested development (especially in the form of reified consciousness), Adorno and Benjamin’s maneuvers demonstrate very different techniques of spell-‐breaking with regard to self-‐reification.
The primary concerns of this paper are twofold: First, to locate and elaborate the problem and significance of the self-‐reification of consciousness as central not only to Frankfurt School thinkers, but to Marxist thought more generally. Self-‐reification presents itself as a form of “ego-‐enclosure” that is unconsciously dependent on psychological structure and tendencies as well as social structures. This concept of self-‐reification encourages us to question the ways in which the commodity form accelerates and disguises the reality of “self-‐forgetting,” which allows capital to solidify its victories in the reified self.
The second concern of the paper is to begin a study of the concepts of magic and mimesis as tropes employed by Benjamin and Adorno in discussions of self-‐forgetfulness related to commodity, fetish, and reification. The paper argues that discussions, images, and theories of “magic” represent a special intersection for the critique of the ideas of identity, naming, thinking, and reification in Adorno and Benjamin, a bewitched spot in which capital’s mystifying and alluring processes of commodity structure and self-‐reification are revealed and therefore made potentially more vulnerable to spell-‐breaking."
Panagiotis Sotiris
Encounter, inexistence of the origin and virtual forms of communism: Althusser’s new materialist practice of philosophy in the 1970s
The recent publication of Althusser’s 1972 course on Rousseau and of his important manuscript, from the second half of the 1970s, on the Initiation to Philosophy for non-‐philosophers, along with other texts already published from the same period, such as Machiavelli and Us, the “Transformation of Philosophy” lecture and the texts on the crisis of Marxism, offers us the possibility to retrace Althusser’s confrontation with the question of a new and highly original materialist practice of philosophy as a parallel process with this attempt towards a left critique of the many shortcomings of the communist movement in a period of strategic crisis. These texts help us realize that the materialism of the encounter should not associated only with the posthumously published texts from the 1980s, but, in
propose a historical understanding which conceives the past and present as an organic totality adopting the presupposition that every history is necessarily contemporary history.
Vicky Sparrow
Resisting the commodity form in language: the poetics of Anna Mendelssohn.
"The poet under capital has been given a heavy task. Since Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of Baudelaire as the poetic subject compelled to give voice to the commodity, and T. W. Adorno’s declamation of poetry’s death in the wake of European fascism, the poetic producer contends with the form’s compromised position.
When it is written through the colonised minds and subject(ivitie)s of late global capitalism, poetry can do nothing but share its linguistic material with capital. Furthermore, poetic language might unavoidably – through techniques which raise the ‘value’ of its composite language – exploit a kind of inflated linguistic economy. Does this methodological sympathy with capitalist logic make poetry predisposed to complicity with capitalist modes of domination? Anyone reading mainstream poetry now might feel constrained to answer yes.
This paper focuses on one writer: Anna Mendelssohn, the poet and activist made (in)famous through her 1972 conviction for conspiracy to cause explosions, along with other members of the British anti-‐capitalist activist group, the Angry Brigade. Mendelssohn’s poetic output finds innumerable ways of resisting the economico-‐linguistic structures of meaning and domination she perceived, and attacked, in concrete social relations under capitalism. The paper considers how poetry can endure its commodification; and how the commodity form endures in language."
Ross Speer
Machiavellian Marxists: Comparing aspects of Gramsci’s and Althusser’s interpretations of Machiavelli
"This paper compares the interpretations of Machiavelli put forward by Gramsci and Althusser. I argue that the two interpretations discussed are more complimentary than has been recognised. Gramsci and Althusser approach Machiavelli with similar concerns and draw from him similar conclusions. By adopting a comparative approach to the texts it becomes possible to uncover the lines of continuity that exist between them.
Machiavelli is of such significant influence on the respective oeuvres of Gramsci and Althusser that looking at them, and in particular the relationship between them, through this lens provides a useful avenue through which we may find an underlying unity between their respective Marxisms. Both thinkers are making use of Machiavelli to construct a non-‐deterministic Marxism, whereby political practice is the most important factor in deciding the course of history. Politics is the space of beginnings, where new aims are constituted as practical projects; the success of which is never guaranteed in advance. Althusser goes on to
make explicit the philosophical conception underlying this – aleatory materialism – and it is argued here that Gramsci acts as an important predecessor to the development of this idea."
Annie Spencer
Toward a Geographical Historical Materialist Theory of Addiction in the Capitalist Mode of Production
"In the United States a growing prescription opiod and heroin epidemic among the working and workless poor is erupting at the same time that dwindling state budgets and brimming state prisons contribute to widening discursive concession among U.S. politicians that the forty-‐year old War on Drugs has been a “failure.” The contradictions of the moment suggest a coming reconfiguration of state policy toward the treatment of drug-‐addicted people, and thus an important moment for studying the state’s role in managing surplus populations and surplus capital.
While the Big Pharma Industrial Complex directs research and development on addiction toward the production of new drugs for the ‘management’ of the presumed-‐terminal condition of being addicted (thereby guaranteeing what recovery can’t—a revenue stream), in addition to new drugs to become addicted to, publicly-‐funded studies, many leveraging the advances afforded by recent MRI and other brain-‐mapping technology reveal a different understanding of the nature of addiction, one in which chronic, early childhood stress and trauma emerge as the strongest predictors for a susceptibility to addiction (CDC 2013, Maté 2010). Scholars bridging the divide between the emerging evidence and existing social policy offer the empirical data to back up what a gut instinct already tells many of us—the primary factors contributing to addiction are social, environmental, political-‐economic, and thus, I contend, inherently spatial.
The new medical and social science research offer insights that problematize the dominant views of addiction and ‘addicts’ that animate existing state policies. The emerging consensus refutes the bio-‐determinist genetic argument as well as the related medical consensus of addiction as a ‘disease,’ and shine a stark light of truth on the criminal justice system’s dismissal of even the 'disease' model, in favor of a liberal-‐punitive ideological construct of the ‘addict’ as a racialized subject— derelict, parasitic, possessing poor moral character and thus an inherent criminality.
In putting an examination of changing state policy, discourse, and infrastructure in response to the opiod and heroin addiction epidemic in conversation with Marxist social theory, the Black Radical Tradition, and Third World Feminism(s), I work toward some intellectual and methodological clarity on the following (working) hypothesis: Addictions arise as an attempt to self-‐medicate the embodied (physical, emotional, socio-‐spiritual) pain that accompanies the necessary violence required for social reproduction under the capitalist
mode of production, which is inherently racial and gendered (see Spencer 2014). I posit that the fatal couplings of difference and power that the system requires (Hall 1992, in Gilmore 2008; see also Smith 1984), always entail social and geographical dislocation (Spencer 2014, Alexander 2012) a process that is always unfolding, transmuting, as capital reconfigures to subvert barriers and maximize accumulation and one in which the state plays a central, but not singular, role.
Jonathan Stafford
Circulation, Repetition and Globalised Patterns of Accumulation: the temporal logic of steam power in nineteenth century imperialist shipping.
In Volume III of Capital, Marx reproduces a lengthy quotation from the Manchester Guardian concerning a practice of ‘fabricating fictitious capital’ whereby the shipping documents of commodities travelling from India by sailing ship around the Cape of Good Hope to England were sent rapidly by steamships via Egypt. Preceding the goods by several months, the documents could be redeemed by the company through pawning the banker’s drafts with a London bank well in advance of actually having to pay for the merchandise. What is significant for Marx in this passage is that the utilisation of steamships marked the simultaneous existence of two distinct structures of temporality in the context of the capitalist means of production. Steamship time as the temporality of industrial capital is rendered in opposition to that of sail – the circulatory logic of merchant capital. This historical departure marks the inception of a new circulatory regime, governed by its own temporal structure, which runs in parallel with the existing system, discontinuously simultaneous but nonsynchronous. This paper sets out to challenge the received logic of temporal acceleration characteristic of the narrative of capitalist spatial domination with a study of new temporal modalities of accumulation on a global scale which exhibit circulatory patterns distinguished rather by their predictability and repetition.
Luke Stobart
The politics and 'anti-‐politics' of Podemos
Contrary to economistic categorisations made of the 15-‐M (Indignados) movement in the Spanish State, this movement was primarily a rebellion against ‘really existing politics’ and an example of the new ‘anti-‐politics’ identified by Humphrys and Tietze. Due to the historic dimensions of the 15-‐M, its consciousness-‐raising, and the reconfiguration of social struggle it inspired, the 15-‐M has fed a progressively-‐inclined organic crisis of the state. More recently, ‘anti-‐politics’ has confirmed its transformative potential through the electoral advance of Podemos — a radical organisation mainly consisting of participants from the ‘new social movements’. In a context of political disaffection and ‘institutional blockage’, Podemos’ systematic antagonism towards ‘the political caste’ enabled it to win 8% of the vote in its first elections, and to dominate subsequent debate in the mainstream. This militancy and Podemos’ ‘new way of doing politics’ (mass assemblies, open primaries and rejection
of ‘closed-‐door’ negotiations) are unsettling and destabilising the traditional Left, and strengthening calls for a change in the institutional framework after the abdication of King Juan Carlos. Even when taking local factors into account, the surprise impact of Podemos suggests that radical ‘anti-‐politics’ provides a strong basis for progressive projects within the contemporary international context.
Robert Stolz
From Imperial Agriculture to “Income Doubling”: The Postwar Japanese Agrarian Crisis
Using Uno Kozo and Tosaka Jun’s understanding of a free-‐floating “feudality”—a feudal essence as opposed to a feudal system—this paper will look at Occupation Japan’s (1945-‐52) agricultural policies as a way to explore how the loss of Japan’s empire forced a rethinking of not only landholding and taxation policies, but also a significant recycling of imperial ideologies that had a profound influence on the structure and politics of the postwar Japanese state. As a way to get at how contemporaries viewed the nature of the global crisis of 1931-‐45 and what they considered necessary for a Japan without an empire, I will use the records and materials submitted to SCAP for the 1950 rehabilitation hearing of the purged head of Yukijirushi (Snow Brand Dairy), Kurosawa Torizō (1885-‐1982). Snow Brand, or its wartime incarnation, Hokkaido kōnō kōsha, is well placed for this discussion: Originally a producers’ cooperative conceived as a solution to the vulnerability of farmers to market and political forces in the Ashio Copper Mine Pollution Incident, it later became a key part of imperial agricultural policy when Kurosawa was appointed to the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA). Though this resulted in an initial breakup and purge by SCAP, both Kurosawa and Snow Brand had reformed on the eve of the Ikeda cabinets’ famous “high-‐growth” and “income doubling” plans of 1960.
Ted Stolze
Paul of Tarsus, Thinker of the Conjuncture
"In my talk I defend the following thesis: the apostle Paul should be understood as a theorist not of the “universal” but of the “conjuncture.” Here I part company with such continental philosophers as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek, who in their own ways have upheld a universalist account of Paul. By contrast, I follow Pauline scholar Neil Elliott, who has criticized such contemporary recapitulations of a longstanding Protestant motif about a supposed radical break between Jesus’ particularizing movement and Paul’s universalizing mission (a motif most recently taken up in books by James Tabor and Reza Aslan). It is important, I contend (following New Testament scholars David Wenham and Bruce Longenecker) to understand Paul as thinking and acting in profound continuity with the teachings and traditions associated with the historically remembered Jesus, in particular, regarding the latter’s identification with, and concern for, the “poor.”
Moreover, I maintain that it is crucial to approach Paul not through an undue emphasis on his Letter to the Romans (as Agamben, Badiou, and Zizek have done), but through his earlier
letters to various ekklēsiae (“assemblies”) of Jesus followers in Thessalonica, Philippi, Galatia, and Corinth. In each of these letters Paul was concerned to address, and to resolve, specific internal community disputes; he played the role of a “troubleshooter.” I equally propose that in these letters Paul was interested in providing concrete analyses of concrete situations within the context of the clashing theologico-‐political priorities of first-‐century Jewish and Roman-‐imperial cultures and traditions.
Finally, in philosophical dialogue with Louis Althusser’s conception of “aleatory materialism,” I approach Paul’s “cosmology” as rooted in what Pauline scholar Troels Engberg-‐Pederson has called a bodily conception of pneuma (“spirit”). I also maintain that Paul was especially concerned, as Althusser would put it, with the primacy of practice over theory, namely, with drawing lines of demarcation between, reconsolidating, and then taking positions on, tendencies within nascent Christian doctrine. In sum, I would like to identify and elaborate on defining key features of what Althusser’s friend Stanislas Breton has called the “radical philosophy” of Paul."
Veronika Stoyanova
The construction of the idea of civil society and its role in the neoliberal transformation in Bulgaria
This paper is an attempt to contribute to research on the postcommunist ‘transitions’ from socialism to capitalism, and particularly on the role of discourse and ideology in these. It focuses specifically on the case of the discursive construction and construal of the idea of ‘civil society’ within the neoliberal agenda of the transformation in Bulgaria. Throughout the course of the Bulgarian ‘transition’, the concept of civil society was predominantly borrowed as an abstract but ready-‐made yardstick by which to judge whether the country was successfully transitioning to a liberal democratic system, and the term came to dominate political discourses. For the purposes of this paper, I take four reports published by NGOs in the period between 1998 and 2007, whereby the ‘state of civil society’ is evaluated and policy recommendations made. I adopt the methodology of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995) in reading these reports, focusing on their language as 1) text, 2) as discursive practice, involving the production and interpretation of text, and as 3) social practice. I also draw on theories of social imaginaries (Taylor 2004) and of utopias and ideologies (Mannheim 1936/1976; Bloch 1954/1986) to acquire the analytical lens to investigate questions of structure, agency and culture in the discursive justification of the specific (neoliberal) form of civil society which was promoted in the Bulgarian postcommunist transformation.
Alen Suceska
Dead Weight of Times Long Past: The Temporality of "Common Sense"
Antonio Gramsci's „common sense“ is a concept signifying a fractured world-‐view composed of various non-‐contemporaneous and often contradictory layers from various historical periods, whereby each represents certain beliefs, values, practices and/or folklore knowledge. This fracturedness is being continuously reproduced by the hegemonic apparatuses of the capitalist class within the integral state (political society + civil society) and used so as to maintain a non-‐critical and reactionary way of thinking and way of life of the masses. But “common sense” can also become “good sense”, i.e. a critical, self-‐conscious and revolutionary world-‐view. In order to think with Gramsci within today’s capitalist conjuncture, there are several questions worth posing: what are the mechanisms endorsed by the ruling class’ hegemonic apparatuses to reproduce and “trigger” the reactionary layers of “common sense”?; in contrast, what are the mechanisms used to repress its progressive layers, effectively preventing it from becoming “good sense”?; what is the role of revolutionaries (organic intellectuals) in “speaking to” “common sense” and how do they find their way through its non-‐contemporaneous layers?; how can the progressive “good sense” be liberated of the dead weight of times long past by a critical political practice?
Kenneth Surin
Dependency Theory's reanimation in the era of financial capital
In this paper I examine the claim, advanced in many quarters and in several versions, that the most recent forms of capitalist development have effectively discredited theories of uneven or dependent development, and this because these theories hinge crucially on conceptions that are no longer plausible theoretically and which have been sidelined by recent historical events. Thus, the ending of the post-‐war 'Golden Age' ensued in a radical restructuring of world capitalism that saw the emergence of new regimes of international competition. These regimes, it is claimed, have allowed the East Asian countries to emerge as full-‐fledged industrial powers (contra dependency theory); and, moreover, the emergence of financialization has up-‐ended the old notion that development has to be predicated on industrialization (again contra dependency theory). Against these views, I’ll argue that dependency or uneven development theory can be expanded to take into account comprador industrialization and financialization.
Dan Swain
The Actuality of Revolution as Guide to Action
"In this paper I offer an interpretation of Lukács’ concept of ‘the actuality of revolution’ as a practical guide to action which is both consistent with and informed by Marx’s commitment to proletarian self-‐emancipation. This concept has been subjected to varied interpretations. On the one hand, it appears to refer to the fact that revolution is historically possible, and recognised to be so. On the other, it suggests a certain revolutionary approach or method,
in which the problems of everyday life are recognised as problems of the revolution. My interpretation stresses the latter of these options, arguing that it is best understood as a guide to revolutionary practice, which stresses at every stage practical questions of working class empowerment and self-‐emancipation.
To this extent I agree with arguments from Paul LeBlanc and Jodi Dean that Lukács’ ideas are of continuing relevance for anyone committed to radical political change, and needn’t be understood as licensing an elitist approach. However, partially against Dean and LeBlanc, I argue that there is an elitist strain in Lukács which must be properly disentangled, and that this rests on his tendency to conflate Marxist theory with revolutionary class consciousness. Although avoiding this conflation unravels some of Lukács’ neat dialectical solutions, it does not completely devalue his approach to revolutionary practice.
Krystian Szadkowski
Political and economic consequences of the first capitalist transformation of the Polish higher education system (1990-‐2008)
"Until 1989 the socialist higher education system in Poland was elite-‐formation oriented, with the average participation rate of 15% of the youth population aged between 19-‐24 and around 400 000 students. The first capitalist transformation of the sector, started in 1990, brought enormous change. Rapid expansion of the enrolments, partially achieved through creation of the large private sector and internal privatization of the public universities, reached its’ peak in 2005 with nearly 2 million students enrolled and participation rate over 50%. The specificity of this universalization of access at the post-‐socialist peripheries remains obscure. Polish higher education system, despite size and openness, became an “accelerator of class division” and a “factory of precarious workers”. The article reads this process, on the one side, through the lenses of the Marxist analysis of a higher education systems' dynamics (using concepts of formal subsumption and ideal form of formal subsumption), on the other, with the focus on the functionality of the system itself for the expanding capitalist labour market (absorption of the potentially unemployed, reduction of the costs of labour power, precarization, substitution of the welfare provision under the neoliberal onslaught). The final part shows how this shift from elite to universal access, specific for the systems of some post-‐socialist countries in the region, not only supported the expansion of capitalism but also formed one of the most important conditions of its survival.
Sebastiano Taccola
Marx and the Ancients. The Italian debate during the Seventies.
"The debate on the social and economic life in the ancient world has often interested Marx scholars. Since the 1950’s, many economic anthropologists, under the influence of the
category of “embedded economy” proposed by Karl Polanyi, have pointed out that the historical materialism categories are not sufficient to understand ancient societies.
Though Marx didn’t leave us a systematic exposition of the ancient modes of production, nevertheless, he was really interested to this kind of problem. It is sufficient to read the parts dedicated to the pre-‐capitalistic modes of production that can be found, not only in the Grundrisse and in the Enthnological Notebooks, but also some in the Capital.
In my presentation I will focus on the Italian debate on Marx and the Ancients during the Seventies.
The contributions given by Marxian-‐oriented Italian philologists, archaeologists and philosophers, far beyond the twentieth century fundamental contrast between primitivism and modernism, represented a deep critique of the economic anthropology and gave new life to historical materialism.
Following this path, it is possible to develop, on the one hand, a radical critique of the “embedded economy” model, and, on the other hand, to overcome the hypostasis and the naturalizations of mainstream historiography. According to me, this could be the key for us to build up a rich comparison between the pre-‐capitalistic and the capitalistic modes of production, and to actualize Marx’s critique of the political economy method, as exposed by him in the Introduction to Grundrisse.
Daniel Tanuro
Climate change: the worker's movement and the necessary reduction of the material production
The 2°C Carbon budget implies for developed capitalist countries to reduce their GHG emissions each year by at least 11%, from now to 2050. Such a reduction is a huge challenge, especially if it goes hand in hand with a phasing out of the nuclear energy (which is absolutely necessary, for obvious reasons). The building of a new energy system, based on renewables, will need great amounts of fossil fuels causing additional emissions of CO2, compared to the BUA scenario. These emissions will have to be compensated by drastic cuts in the primary energy consumption. The unescapable conclusion is that the success of the energy transition depends on a serious reduction in the material production and transportation. As a consequence, it is not enough to ask for more green jobs. Neither a carbon tax will be an instrument to cope with the urgency of the situation. To conciliate the quick reduction in the material production with the worker's demands for jobs and against austerity will be possible only within the framework of a very radical and global anticapitalist policy, including a.o.: the planification of the transition, at least at the European level, the nationalisation of energy and finance, the closure of harmful or unnecessary industries, the worker's control on the quality of their production, new jobs in new public services in the fields of dwelling insulation, the location of the food production,
land management and care of the environment, and a drastic reduction in the working time -‐ without wage loss-‐ as a qualitative compensation for certain quantitative changes in the way of life. There's no shortcut, no place for a class collaboration policy. The point of non return has been passed in the melting of the ice cap of Western Antarctica. Radical left should unify its forces in order to sound the tocsin and elaborate an ecosocialist plan in order to limit the catastrophy.
Zehra Tasdemir Yasin
Capital, Nation-‐State and Ecology: Production of Mosulas as an oil-‐field, 1914-‐1958
This paper explores the historically and geographically specific relationship between capitalist development and nation-‐state formation with respect to the socio-‐ecological content of this relationship based on the instance of the incorporation of the Ottoman province of Mosul into the modern world economy in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on the archival research conducted at the British Petroleum Company Archives, it explores particular spatial modalities through which Mosul was reproduced as a concrete space of both nation-‐state, i.e. Iraq, and commodity frontier. It firstly argues that the demarcation of the geo-‐political boundaries of mobility and sovereignty was not only a geo-‐political process, but also a process of demarcating and defining economic space of nation-‐state within the world division of labor and nature. Secondly, rather than presuming oil as a “raw material” or “free gifts of nature” in the process of commodity production, it specifies the abstraction and exploitation of Mosul oil as a matter of a specific socio-‐ecological relation that creates value through alienation of nature and human-‐nature relation. It argues that the production of Mosul in the image of the cycle of oil production created the concrete economic space of nation-‐state in which nature is dominated to the relation of exchange.
Eigo Tateishi
Smoking Metropolises: Capitalist urbanization and fossil fuels
"Urban areas are the most significant contributors to today’s global warming. International Energy Agency estimates that approximately 70 % of CO2 emissions stem from urban activities. At the same time, as David Harvey argues, urbanization is a primary way of absorbing over-‐accumulated capital, which is imperative for the survival of capitalism. Can we find any theoretical connection between fossil fuel consumption within the city and capitalist urbanization? I shall try to show that today’s global capitalism and the mass consumption of fossil fuels are indeed closely linked. This shall be done by showing not only that capitalist production is fossil-‐fuel-‐dependent (FFD) but also that spatio-‐temporal fixes for crises of over accumulation, as identified by David Harvey formulated, is FFD as well. The sequence might be sketched in the following way:
{[CP + FF = AC] → [OAC] → [STF(U) + FF’]} →
{[CP’ + FF’’ = AC’] → [OAC’] → [STF(U)’ + FF’’’]} →
{[CP’’ + FF’’’ = AC’’] → [OAC’’] → [STF(U)’’ + FF’’’’]} →
…continues until the ecological (or systemic) breakdown.
Abbreviations:
CP : Capitalistic Production
FF : Fossil Fuels
AC : Accumulation
OAC : Over Accumulation
STF(U) : Spatio-‐Temporal Fix (Urbanization)
I would like to discuss these theoretical arguments with special reference to Marx, Lefebvre, and Harvey while referring to my future fieldwork outcomes about Iskandar Malaysia urban development project in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, during this summer.
Michael Thompson
Reified Intersubjectivity: A Critique of Contemporary Critical Theory
The power of the commodity form to shape consciousness is at the heart of the theory of reification. Despite this, contemporary critical theory persists in defining itself against reification through the pragmatist theory of knowledge and social action. For thinkers such as Habermas, Honneth and others of the third generation of critical theory, this means that a theory of society can be articulated external to the powers of reification stemming from the specific socialization processes that occur under capitalism. In this paper, I will extend the theory of reification beyond the commodity form and into a more general theory of deformed consciousness that emerges from capitalist forms of socialization – due to commodification but also the specific forms of value acquisition that occurs from capitalist economic life – and argue that this has deep effects on consciousness that render intersubjectivity an unsuitable framework from which to formulate a critical theory. Specifically, I will argue that capitalist culture comes to effect the value-‐orientations of subjects which then warp cognitive and epistemic capacities, rendering theories of discourse ethics and recognition essentially unable to formulate critical consciousness. I then sketch a critique of Habermas and Honneth and their theories of modernity and consciousness.
Alan Thornett
The biodiversity crisis: the sixth great extinction "The biodiversity crisis: the sixth great extinction
Alan Thornett is a writer and campaigner on ecological issues. He is active in the Campaign Against Climate Change and its trade union committee. He is a member of the editorial boards of Socialist Resistance and of International Viewpoint. His book Militant Years is an account of his time as a trade union leader in the car industry.
This paper will look at what is arguably the biggest single impact on the biosphere of the planet by climate change and the ecological crisis: crisis the crisis of biodiversity.
That is best described as the sixth great species extinction to hit the planet in its 450 million year history.
That we are therefore living through a new geological epoch: the epoch of the Anthropocene—as argued by ecologist Eugene Stoermer and Nobel Prize-‐winning atmospheric chemist Paul Cruzen.
That whilst previous mass extinctions were the result of naturally occurring phenomena this one is a result of the unconscious activities of the most, successful, and rapacious species the planet has produced—modern human beings.
The paper will note that:
• Between 40 and 50 percent of species on the planet could be extinct by the mid-‐ century
• In the tropics around 5,000 species are being lost each year.
• The extinction rate among amphibians is a mind-‐boggling 45,000 times higher than the “background” rate that existed for millions of years.
• A quarter of all mammal species are at risk (the background rate for mammals is one in 700 years).
• The acidification of the oceans means that coral reefs are dying off as are organisms that rely on calcification for their shell structure.
The paper will discuss the necessary steps to be taken to mitigate this situation and to seek to reverse it and it will argue that extinction rates of this kind puts at risk all species on the planet including, eventually, our own."
Tania Toffanin
Feminism in Italy after the Seventies: from the struggle for the wages for housework to the ideology of equal opportunities
"In Italy during the Seventies there were many feminist movements claiming for the refusal of the androcentrism but also the idea of “equality”, considered as an empty box useful for neglecting women’s condition. But after the legalisation of divorce and abortion and the
formal recognition of the “women question” the feminist movements collapsed. The season of terrorism played a crucial role in Italy to order the political discourse: after that season the “social conflict” was considered as mere “violence”, also for the normalisation done by the Italian Communist Party that needed to be legitimated as a democratic party. In the Eighties while the Italian communist party and left unionism changed their aims as a consequence of the political exchange that allowed them to keep their structure with the assurance to decline any revolutionary perspectives, other more radical left movements disappeared. These processes of both institutionalization and weakening concerned also feminism. Both the concept of “equality” and “difference” have mystified that also for women the standard, the unit of measure has become men and their behaviour in public and private sphere. This standard also changes on the basis of economic and social contingencies but it continues to dominate. And what about the gender dimension? It has been formally but elusively solved by the “ideology of equal opportunities” while the intersection between gender and class has been totally silenced.
So why do we take for granted or imagine that feminism would be fully impermeable to capitalism? I think that Marxism has been given more blame than it had in relation to the concealment of the “women question”. Considering what happened in Italy, as working class movements hidden the gender, the feminist movements dismissed the class and both feminism and Marxism have lost a crucial battle. As already highlighted in 1971 by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the struggle of women had to fight patriarchy and act as a catalyst for other subjectivities dominated by the patriarchal system. While feminist movements have got lost in the creation of modern gynaecea, reduced within the logic of equal opportunities, the working class has dismissed its identity. The result has been again the disavowal of the inseparable bond between productive and reproductive work in a circular process that allows the State to deny any engagement in reducing the care burdens and the reproduction of the patriarchal system as well."
Stavros TOMBAZOS
The Economic Crisis in Cyprus
Cyprus’s model of accumulation was not only structurally unbalanced but also very sensitive to exogenous developments, especially after the accession of Cyprus in the EU and the adoption of the euro. The economic crisis in Cyprus is closely related to the deep and prolonged recession in Greece. In the general context of the European economic slowdown, the Cypriot ‘hypertrophic’ banking system, expanded internationally in recent years, couldn’t absorb the double shock of the increase of its non-‐performing loans in Greece and the ‘haircut’ of Greek sovereign debt. The memorandum imposed on Cyprus led to a vicious circle, where the recession of the ‘real economy’ fuels the banking crisis and vice versa. Beside the decrease in wages, the austerity policies didn’t result to an increase in Cyprus’s price-‐competitiveness, but to the rise of the labour force’s exploitation. Under these circumstances, an exit from the structural crisis is not in sight.
Adorno's Inverse Theology
It has often been noted that Adorno’s works abound with references to golden calves, image bans and broken vessels. The religious provenance of Adorno’s terminology, thus, invites the question what – if anything – these references mean in the wider context of his work? Such an inquiry requires considerable qualification for two reasons. Firstly, Adorno does not engage at any point in a sustained scholarly inquiry into the nature of God that might be called properly theological in an academic sense. (Certainly, Adorno had no formal knowledge of, either, the Jewish or Christian traditions from which he draws.) Secondly, Adorno explicitly accepts the verdicts of his intellectual progenitors Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, arguing that “positive religion has lost its (…) validity”; that “traditional theology is not restorable.” Accordingly, his many invocations of biblical motifs are, indeed, somewhat surprising, begging the question how they are to be seen as anything more than incidental metaphors. My wager is that the answer to this question lies in Adorno’s enigmatic notion of an “‘inverse’ theology”, contained in a letter to Walter Benjamin, dated 17.12.1934. As I argue, the point is that ‘inverse theology’ presupposes a particular kind of reversal: on the one hand, it concerns a standard enlightenment narrative which teaches that the traditional authority of a monotheistic world-‐view wanes with the advancement of the natural sciences; on the other hand, it concerns the view that the ostensibly modern phenomenon of capitalism is itself imbued with religious characteristics. Against the backdrop of recent work on this question (Hamacher, Santner, Khatib) I ask whether it is conceivable that Adorno, too, turns the displaced terms of theology against the capitalism cult religion."
Sofia Tsadari
Τhe 50 shades of red: perspectives of the left in conflict during the memorandum era in Greece
"The introduction of Greece to the ""support"" mechanism in the spring of 2010 marks a historic milestone. The memorandum era is a synonymous of flagrant oppression of the working majority and the youth. At the same time it is a period of extremely massive and important social struggles. Unprecedented worker's strikes and the square movement constitute key moments, in the development of which left-‐wing organisations played a leading role. So it is important to record what they were advocating, and it is for sure that there were differences. In this viewpoint ""red had many shades"".
In this paper we will examine the different assessments and political responses of the left on some issues that we consider fundamental. The background of different political answers and slogans is the basic assessments concerning a) the standing of Greece and its economy at international level and b) the character of this new period that follows the entry into the memorandum era. Is Greece a dependent territory and what is the content of the term dependency? Do we experience a state of occupation similar to the 1940s? (critical
approach to the theories of dependence / new occupation). What is the role and the conditions of the Greek participation in EU? (critique of the neoliberal view underlining the facts of uneven development and the exploitative character of the union, critical approach to the possibility of a social European Union). And, ultimately, how is the answer to these questions related to the political platforms of the left? (upgrading the national or class nature of the struggle).
There is an extensive discussion concerning the fragmentation of the left wing. However, the demand for unity stumbles over rocks in the darkness. Which are the rocks? On the basis of different approaches, the simple invocation of unity is not sufficient when strategic matters are existent.
Capitalism survives for one more reason, because of the strategic failure of the counter-‐power that could overthrow it."
George Tsogas
The Commodity Form in Cognitive Biocapitalism -‐ Alive and Excessive
Through the thought of Sohn-‐Rethel we can see how his daring suggestions on the ontological unity of consciousness and commodity exchange can have a renewed relevance for the era of cognitive biocapitalism. He can help us see under new light and explain how commodities in cognitive biocapitalism appeal and appear to us. In this paper, we explain how the feelings and emotions of the immaterial labour of thousands of people is embedded in any commodity, even in such a “simple” thing as a t-‐shirt or a pair of cool trainers. But, cognitive biocapitalism creates no “simple” commodities. Each and every one becomes the depository of a vast array of cognition and states of consciousness; not only of the mechanical knowledge, the data of the manufacturing and logistic systems, but also of the sentiments, sensations and ways of life of workers along the value chain. All these are amassed into a logo, a brand name, a symbol of the commodity, and through it are channelled back to us. They are our own knowledge and thoughts that we project into the commodity and it, in turn, sends them back to us. They match perfectly our own thoughts, feelings, and expectations of life, because they are parts of us; they are us.
In that way, it makes perfect sense that in cognitive biocapitalism (as business practitioners understand very well) commodities may only come to life (often through the blood and tears of exploited workers) when – and because of – a particular outlet for their desire, adoration and consumption has arose and calls for them to come into existence. We – our consciousness – are that outlet. Anticipated consumption (that is our cognitive states, formed as they are by capitalist commodity exchange) dictate what, how, where, when, how much, by whom, etc. will be produced. Production matches the demands that consumption puts upon it. Knowledge is not outside and unaffected by the production
process; it is shaped by it, enshrined into a commodity-‐form, which, in turn, is in harmony with our own levels of consciousness.
The commodity form in cognitive biocapitalism is alive and kicking with the excessive energy of life itself. It is life!
Jana Tsoneva & Georgi Medarov
Representative Democracy and its Discontents: the Rise of the Rhyzomatic Party Form
"November 2014 will mark the 25th anniversary of the transition to democracy in Bulgaria. Far from an occasion for jubilation over the relatively unproblematic implementation of liberal political and economic reforms, the past year's popular mobilizations and dismal performance of electoral politics have alarmed liberal intellectuals. In an idealist fashion, they are (mistakenly) looking for the causes of the crisis of representation the rise of “populism” rather than in the glitches in capital accumulation, austerity and the incapacity of the neoliberal ideological straitjacket on democracy to offer change of politics, rather than of politicians. Since 1989 Bulgarians have not re-‐elected any incumbent government; Bulgaria, therefore, is a country where electoral volatility makes it easy for new parties to displace old ones, only to be cast away shortly after. In that respect, the 2013 mass protests in Bulgaria were not a disillusionment with some imperfections of liberal democracy (e.g. “corruption”), but directed against representative politics as such.
Our contribution discusses the logic of the crisis of representation plaguing parties across the political spectrum. We scrutinize the effects of discursive strategies of political elites on party ideology, nomenclature and organization, specifically the rise of what we call “rhyzomatic party form”."
Lori Turner
“Walter Benjamin, Precarious Labour, and the Proletarianisation of the Independent Producer”
In this paper I would like to explore Benjamin’s writings from 1924-‐1934, beginning with One Way Street and ending with “The Present Social Situation of the French Writer” and “Author as Producer”. Over the course of these 10 years of hyper inflation, unemployment, malnutrition, monopolisation, concentration of capital and ending with economic depression and the victory of fascism, Benjamin confronts the problem of class and working class consciousness with an analysis of his own changing class position. This paper is neither biography nor history. I would like to address a dimension of Benjamin’s analysis which is grounded in self-‐reflection informed by a historical materialism he consciously adopts in 1924. Contrary to much Benjamin scholarship which denies the political dimension of his work, Benjamin is very clear that political and economic conditions affected the direction of his thought. Material deprivation and precarious work opportunities (an awareness of his
position within the production process) led to theoretical reflection on the fate of the independent producer – regarding both his own work and that of a variety of authors whose works he reviewed as a freelance writer.
Tom Twiss
Trotsky, Bureaucracy, and Capitalist Restoration
Between 1917 and his death in 1940 Trotsky advanced three diverse analyses of the problem of Soviet bureaucracy, each of which provided a very different account of how bureaucracy was promoting capitalist restoration in the USSR. This paper will trace the development of Trotsky’s views on these questions—from his “administrative” focus the issue of bureaucratic inefficiency during the civil war and the early years of NEP; to his initially impressive but increasingly problematic characterization of the bureaucratized state and party apparatuses as highly responsive to external, alien class pressures during the years 1923-‐33; to his final theory, most fully articulated in The Revolution Betrayed, of the bureaucracy as a highly autonomous social formation threatening to transform itself into a new capitalist class. The paper will conclude with some observations regarding both the significant weaknesses and the major strengths of Trotsky’s final theory and its predictions regarding the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.
Martin Upchurch & Claudio Morrison
Nationalism, Neoliberalism and Revolt in Bosnia
In February 2014 a revolt broke out across Bosnia and Herzegovina. The rebellion included demands for payment of delayed wages, for renationalisation of privatised industries, an end to asset stripping by oligarchs, and for the reduction of salaries for local political elites. Plenums, or peoples’ assemblies, began to reject the nationalist and ‘ethnic’ division of the country. The roots of nationalism and ‘ethnic’ division are located in the 1980s when the economy of Yugoslavia was in crisis and crippled with debt (Chossudovsky 1997). Nationalism was presented by elites as a way out of the crisis. After the civil wars Bosnia was left isolated, held together in ‘ethnically’ based entities by the 1995 Dayton Accord. Loans and grants from international financial institutions and USAID liberalised the economy but created debt subservience and worker impoverishment (Upchurch 2009). However, a class-‐based anti-‐nationalist mood has now developed. In this paper we present the story of the protests but also examine the politics of nationalism and anti-‐nationalism in post socialist states. We assess the dynamic interplay between nationalism and the economics of market democracy with reference not only to Bosnia but also the states of the former Soviet Union.
Ugo Urbano & Casares Rivetti
Critique and Modernity: Raymond Williams' Marxism
Here I intend to examine the work of Raymond Williams through a perspective still rather underexplored by the specialized literature: namely, that of a project interested in the comprehension of modern society and of the historical process that, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, formed its bases, which, in the English case, were, notably, industrialism and democracy. In order to accomplish such task, I intend to adress the relations between the work of Williams and those traditions which were his greatest influences: English literary criticism and Marxism. These theoretical strands concern me both because this matter (critique of modernity) takes a central position in its theoretical schemes, as well as because they rest in the foundation of Williams’ thought, as he himself stated on different occasions. I intend to focus on the genesis of the thought of Williams in its interrelationship with those two traditions, always assuming the fact that (and this is my first hypothesis) the theory of culture of Williams can only be plainly understood if inserted in this major project of critique of modernity: as Williams states in Culture and Society (1958), the task is to think culture as a concept which expresses the general reactions to the social changes that took place after the Industrial Revolution and which carried on throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. According to this hypothesis, the same statement could be made about the theories of culture of Marxism and of English literary criticism: when dissociated from its social and historical dimensions, the notions of culture mobilized by these two approaches loose meaning. My second hypothesis is that, when the work of Raymond Williams is framed as a critique of modernity nourished by these two theoretical influences, it is possible to identify a path in its development: in the 1950s, a closer relation to the English literary criticism tradition and, as a result, a critique of modernity as industrial society. On the other hand, in the 1960s and 1970s (and, according to my hypothesis, notably in The Country and The City), a closer relation to Marxism and, as a result, a critique of modernity in a Marxist approach: for here (again, especially in The Country and The City) Williams apprehends the critique of industrial society and civilization of the English literary tradition as what it really was, as a critique of capitalism.
Jonas Van Vossole
Global Climate Governance: a legitimation crisis Capitalism, power and alienation -‐ Marxist and Polanyian Perspectives
This article frames the failure of COP19 in Warsaw, the problems of the RIO+20 summit, the failure of the Copenhagen COP15 and the problems of the carbon markets within a broader legitimacy crisis of Global Governance, consequence of the crisis of the global capitalist socio-‐ecology. Two mechanisms give rise to the loss of legitimacy; unequal development and mercantilization, or the reconfiguration of the power balance and the destruction of social ties. As a consequence both winners and losers contest the legitimacy of the institutions and mechanisms that govern global capitalism. In this article, we distinguish Marx-‐type of contestation, referring to emerging classes/states and Polanyi-‐type of contestation, referring to the victims of global mercantilization. In the case of Climate
governance, these are represented by the role of the BRIC’s in climate negotiations and by the global environmental justice movement.
Murillo van der Laan & Mariana Shinohara
Roncato The June Days in Brazil and the challenges of the left
In june 2013, during the Confederations Cup, the wave of mass protests that, since 2008, affected many countries reached Brazil. Initially, the demonstrations were motivated by the rejection of the public transportation fare increases in Sao Paulo. After a violent state repression, the marches have grown significantly, spreading through various Brazilian cities and culminating with the direct involvement of millions of people. The agenda of the protests also grew and varied, encompassing different demands from different sectors of the Brazilian society. These events questioned an assumed socioeconomic optimism ongoing in the country – based on economic stability, unemployment reduction, welfare programs, easier credit access, etc. –, highlighting the limits of the so-‐called new developmentalism policies. In this context, our aim in the article is to analyse the various positions of the left-‐wing movement (intellectuals, parties, social movements, etc.) concerning the causes, developments and challenges brought forward by the so-‐called June Days. Some of the questions that emerge from this debate are: the current organizational issues of the working class, new forms of struggle, the limits of the Partido dos Trabalhadores' hegemony, the concurrent attempt of the traditional right to capitalize the national instabilities, the resurgence of the far-‐right movement, etc.
Matt Vidal
Sociology and the seven theses of Marxism -‐ Or, sociological marxism without apologies
This paper seeks to challenge the declining influence of classical marxism within sociology, with a particular thought not exclusive focus on American sociology. While many basic marxist analytical categories and insights have been assimilated into sociology, and marxist concepts such as class, hegemony and the labor process continue to be used within sociology in vaguely marxist ways, historical materialism, crisis theory and value theory have been largely excoriated from the discipline, at least within the American academy. This exorcism has been largely performed by two scholars who are among the best known American marxist sociologists – Michael Burawoy and Erik Olin Wright – both of whom have recently been presidents of the American Sociological Association. This paper reviews Burawoy and Wright’s explicit attempts to define marxist sociology as a combination of class analysis, labor process analysis and state theory, while explicitly rejecting historical materialism, value theory and crisis theory. As such, Burawoy and Wright have presented a neomarxism that is a gross distortion of classical marxism, one which systematically neglects the remarkable range of vibrant theory and research guided by the core theses of classical marxism. In the process, they have robbed sociology of the tools it needs to explain core
problems in the contemporary global political economy. I will argue that despite the modern political and academic ritual of trying to find the holy grail that invalidates marxism, it is in fact a living, vibrant research program consisting of at least seven core theses – on the social construction of reality, historical materialism, and the contradictory and problematic reproduction of capitalism – each of which has inspired whole research traditions, making marxism the critical social research program par excellence. These theses, which are irreducibly-‐marxist, continue to present singularly penetrating and analytically fruitful insights into the operation of capitalist societies. Without some version of the bulk of these theses, critical analysis of capitalism would be impossible. As such, they provide the basis for a unified sociological framework that could – if it were not so apologetic – offer a real alternative to mainstream economics.
Satnam Virdee
A Marxism without guarantees: Stuart Hall and why race matters
"Stuart Hall was probably the most important socialist intellectual of post-‐war Britain. The first editor of New Left Review, ‘he continued to play an outstanding role in the broader New Left for the rest of his life’ (Blackburn 2014: 75). Unlike so many in the western Marxist tradition who tended to produce a form of theory largely divorced from political practice, Hall was an organic intellectual – embedded in the anti-‐racist black movement – and someone who appreciated that ‘theory is a detour on the road to somewhere more important’. This paper undertakes an assessment of Stuart Hall’s writings on racism, class and historical capitalism – particularly that body of work he produced in the course of his critical engagement with the intellectual thought of Marx, Althusser and Gramsci. It suggests that for too long Marxist explanations of racism have remained narrowly grounded within the organization of work and labour market inequalities, and thus open to the charge of economic reductionism. I discuss how in ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’ (1980) and ‘Gramsci’s relevance to the study of race and ethnicity’ (1986) Hall offers Marxists a way out of this impasse by giving greater consideration to the political, ideological and cultural dimensions structuring and manufacturing racialized social divisions. In particular, he outlines the contours of an innovative theoretical framework for understanding racism that is capable ‘of dealing with both the economic and superstructural features of such societies, while at the same time giving a historically-‐concrete and sociologically-‐specific account of its distinctive racial aspects’ (1980: 336). In conclusion I draw out a number of theoretical and political implications of Hall’s re-‐thinking of the race/class nexus, including how race can no longer be seen as an epiphenomenon, a mere phenomenological expression of the underlying reality of social class but rather something that is relatively autonomous and needs to be given its own specificity. A related implication of race not being reducible to the ‘economic sphere’ is that Hall helps to shift our gaze towards the study of how racism ‘works’ at the political and cultural levels of society suggesting that there are additional layers of explanation that require excavation if we are
to fully account for the reproduction of racism in contemporary society, and understand why capitalism continues to survive into the 21st century.
Marina Vishmidt & Melanie Gilligan
Subjects of Crisis
This paper is part of a larger body of ongoing research and publishing investigating how current shifts in the material relations of money, commodities, and social abstraction in general shape contemporary forms of interority. There has been a surfeit of discussion of the ways in which subjects are formed through their social roles within the relations of production, but less has been said about the determinate shaping of people by abstraction. This preliminary inquiry into the relationship between capitalist abstraction and subjectivity has two parts. In the first, we will discuss some of the most significant theoretical accounts of capitalist abstraction; in the second, we will depart from the history of Marxist thought towards the future of capitalism, tracing a few of the abstract psychologies on which that future depends, and setting out some reflections on how they -‐ and it -‐ might be overcome. If the contemporary subject is a derelict shell housing data bodies, social commodities and quantified selves, we need to develop another materialist understanding of the subject, one which looks to the collective production of affects and rationalities in resistance which both exhibit -‐ and forecast the surpassing of -‐ the symptoms of our present.'
Zhaohui Wang
The world-‐systems theory, the US-‐China economic relations, and the global economic crisis
Through the lens of the world-‐systems theory, I understand the global economic crisis as a structural crisis within the world-‐economy and the China-‐US imbalanced economic relations to a large extent contribute to this structural crisis. The United States, as the core country, has the exorbitant privilege of issuing the dollar used as international reserve currency and a tendency to live beyond its means. China, as the periphery country, has been committed to export-‐led growth based on the maintenance of an undervalued exchange rate. China has intervened in the foreign-‐exchange market to keep its currency down, which results in large accumulation of dollar reserves. I will argue that the US and China actually form a symbiotic relationship in the capitalist world-‐economy. The growth of China’s export engine and the growth of its dollar reserves and US debts are both closely linked to the consumption spree in the US. However, I would also argue that the symbiotic relationship between the US and China is not long-‐term sustainable but conducive to the structural crisis of the world-‐economy. The Triffin Dilemma has pointed out the monetary system based on the currency of one country cannot sustainably deliver both liquidity and confidence. Finally, I will discuss China’s response policies to the recent global economic crisis in both domestic and international dimensions, including the fiscal stimulus package, the economic restructuring, and the internationalization of the renminbi.
Rikard Warlenius
A renewable transition: Capitalist barriers and Socialist enticements
Despite what obviously makes sense, and despite the long-‐term interests of ANY social class or force, very little is done to avoid catastrophic climate change. In order to overcome the self-‐destructive mode of current capitalist development, we need to consider what aspects of renewable energy are so threatening to capital accumulation that even climate chaos is preferred, and how they can be transcended.
Siobhan Watters
Capital's Means of Subsistence
Food production was one of capital's first strongholds (i.e. through primitive accumulation) and remains a principle mechanism by which capitalism survives. We often fail to realize that the incarceration of food by the commodity form degrades the food object itself and guarantees continued dependency on the wage. It is the body’s frailty, its need for the means of subsistence, that forces the subject to move through capital’s infrastructure of self-‐valorization, repeatedly constituting capital through the extraction of her surplus labour and participation in exchange. And yet, food commodities are produced not to satisfy human need, but capital’s, e.g. the ways in which food is manufactured are intended to make products shelf-‐stable and resilient in transit, not nutritious and safe for the end consumer. This paper will explore the contradiction between the concrete and abstract natures of commodities as embodied by the food object as a way of illustrating the progressive disavowal of human need by capital, in spite of human necessity’s pre-‐constitutive role in the formation of capitalist relations. This contradiction creates not only a profound crisis for human life, but for capital itself, as it ceaselessly negates the ground of its own survival.
Amy Wendling
A Brief History of Property: How Duties to Objects and Community were transformed into Possessive Individualism
"As a concept, Property undergoes some crucial modifications during the modern and contemporary periods. The talk looks at the history of the property concept in the West, and traces the narrowing of this concept to the form of property holding we recognize as possessive individualism. Possessive individualism, as its name indicates, is the form of property holding most likely to produce the Tragedy of the Commons. To illustrate this, the talk will discuss the troubles of the property concept, once narrowed into the form of possessive individualism, when it is applied to resources like surface and groundwaters.
A related feature of possessive individualism is its disregard for the qualities of the things held as property, in favor of abstract quantifications such as their exchange value or functionality. So, as the property concept comes to range over more and more kinds of things, it does so by abstracting from their precise qualities.
The talk will draw on Marx’s histories of the property concept in various notebooks and published works."
Chris Williams
Assessing Development Strategies in the Context of Neoliberalism and the Age of Ecological Crisis: A Comparative Analysis of Vietnam, Morocco and Bolivia
"Vietnam, Morocco and Bolivia, where I have spent the last few months examining the nexus of energy, water and food in the context of climate change, are three rapidly developing countries which are simultaneously among the most severely threatened by global warming. While each is on a slightly different developmental pathway, through capitalist economic development and growth, each is attempting to escape the legacy, amongst other power dynamics, of unequal ecological exchange generated by a history of European colonization and domination.
As such, in the new age of ecological crisis, they offer striking examples of how ruling elites in each country, as well as the working people they govern, are further assimilating into a United States-‐dominated, globalized and neoliberal capitalism. In a quite striking manner, government reports are replete with references to climate change and the need to develop in ecologically sustainable ways. Yet, in practice, government policy often contradicts their own reports. The process is therefore highly contradictory and conflictual, as nation states see their salvation through a prism of helter-‐skelter growth based on exports, industrialized agriculture, and the exploitation of natural resources which can be seen as a form of green neocolonialism.
Analysis of these countries on three separate continents, which in many ways exemplify combined and uneven development, offer the opportunity to examine how internal pressures combine with larger, external forces of imperial power and capitalist dynamics, to produce developmentalist states in the context of expected severe climate disruption. How much room for maneuver do these states have, and what would be required for any of them to move in a recognizably different direction? One that increases climate resilience, ecological sustainability and social equity? To what extent can one argue any of them are doing so? As a comparative analysis, this paper will examine similarities and differences in order to generalize from these examples and posit potential alternatives."
Jocelyn Wills
Satellite Surveillance and Outer Space Capitalism, Jocelyn Wills, History, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
"My paper will explore the ways in which capitalism in outer space incorporated satellite-‐based surveillance technologies, firms, entrepreneurs, and workers in Canada into regional industrial, academic and military alliances, particularly with the United States. I employ research on the 45-‐year history of Canada’s MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) as a case study in this development. Founded in Vancouver, British Columbia during 1969, MDA evolved from a four-‐person software consultancy into one of the world’s most significant suppliers of reconnaissance, communications and earth observation satellites, as well as a prime commercial and government contractor for surveillance and intelligence information. MDA is also a major provider of the ground stations that receive, process, archive, and exploit satellite data, the navigational systems that support aircraft (including unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones), and robots working in space.
The path from a small, local firm to a global operation was not smooth, but throughout the stages of MDA’s development, engineers and scientists consistently maintained their faith in technology’s power to revolutionise the world for the better. That faith, along with MDA’s increasing integration into the USA’s military-‐industrial-‐academic complex and participation in the commercialisation and commodification of outer space, demonstrates that a critical engagement with historical materialism continues to matter to our understanding of society and outer space.
Sociologists Johan Söderberg and Adam Netzén suggest that despite the post-‐structural turn, a rejection of the dialectic, and the project of deconstructing the dichotomy between human agency and the larger structural forces of capitalism, we need to remember that human subjects/classes and power structures have remained relatively stable precisely because “we are living in a society seduced by dreams about perpetual change and newness.” (Söderberg and Netzén, 2010, 97, 111) MDA’s experience reinforces this need. Karl Marx may have underestimated the adaptability of capitalism, the many stages, technological innovations and class fractions it might produce. (Bourdieu, 1984, 283-‐317) But Marx made astute historical observations, including:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. (Marx, 1994, 1)
Historians care about such contexts as we map change (and continuity) over time. Looking at the context behind the MDA experience does not mean, however, that new theoretical approaches and the relationships, systems, networks, and products that people create and engage do not matter. Rather, it is the synergy between an uncritical faith in new technology and the post-‐structural, technology turn that has tended to obscure the larger historical forces that drew MDA and others into outer space projects in the first place.
MDA’s competitive posturing in outer space resulted in increased economic crises and the further consolidation of the global elite while simultaneously contributing to increased global uncertainty, including job insecurity.
Because they thought they were different from previous industrial workers, most engineers at MDA simply adjusted to the next phase of capitalism rather than challenge it. In this they were far from alone. People from all walks of life rationalise their decisions and choose selective memories from the past to make sense of their current circumstances. Social anthropologist Hylton White recently captured this reality. In an environment structured for unending expansion, he reminds us that capitalism inevitably turns each new wave of technological enthusiasm, gadget and profession from an exotic first to a ubiquitous commodity. (White, 2013, 667-‐81) Satellite-‐based surveillance technologies and outer space are no different.
The paper will provide an overview of satellite-‐based surveillance technologies, their applications and users, and how they influence daily life. I then turn to the historical context MDA inherited from previous generations. Finally, I focus on MDA, and what lessons we might draw from the firm’s stages of development, the capitalists who guided the firm, and how MDA’s engineers adjusted to their role as workers over time."
Colin Wilson
Intersectionality in early capitalism: race and sexuality in Enlightenment France "Theme: Intersections of Marxism, feminism, critical race and postcolonial theories
A profound ambivalence typifies eighteenth-‐century political theory. Enlightenment authors endorse rationality and the rule of law, yet such values coexist with an increase in racial and class violence such as slavery and the frequent use of capital punishment. As Losurdo has recently highlighted, readers are constantly led to question how far asserted universalisms are truly universal, and how far they reflect the interests of particular class, gender and racial interests.
This paper seeks to build on this work to examine ideas around sexuality and race in the work of authors including Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot. In seeking to reject Christian sexual morality, such authors repeatedly reference other cultures – both non-‐European and ancient societies. Insofar as they are seeking to create a “civilised” morality rooted in universal natural laws, then, their concepts of sexuality always exist in ambiguous dialogue with a racial other. The literary forms of Enlightenment texts centring on sex and race – such as dialogues, novels and satires – only increase the difficulty of assessing how far they are conservative or subversive. Locating these authors in the context of early capitalist France, the paper argues that these ambiguities are best understood as reflecting the social conflicts of the Ancien Régime."
Jim Wolfreys
Austerity politics and the relationship between conservatism and fascism "Austerity politics and the relationship between conservatism and fascism
The European elections of 2104 saw an unprecedented rise in votes for fascist and authoritarian populist parties campaigning on an anti-‐immigration platform. This paper focuses on the 4.7m votes achieved by the Front National (FN) in France and the 4.4m votes for UKIP in the UK. Do these results reflect a capacity on the part of such parties to win lasting electoral support? Are these scores primarily a symptom of the fragmentation of the mainstream right, reflecting the disarray of a traditional conservative electorate, or is there evidence to suggest that working class voters are being won from the left to authoritarian politics via a racist agenda?
The paper examines the long-‐term implications of growing electoral support for authoritarian populist and fascist parties. It assesses the role played by mainstream parties in legitimizing racist attitudes towards immigrants, situating the claims made by Labour politicians that the party must take a tougher line on ‘mass migration’ from Europe in the context of the failure of the UMP and the Parti Socialiste to stem the rise of the Front National by pandering to racist attitudes towards migrants.
It examines the relationship between conservative and authoritarian populist parties and fascism. To what extent do parties like UKIP, or initiatives like those developed by Philippe de Villiers in France, act as temporary transmission belts between the mainstream right and parties with an extra-‐parliamentary agenda? Are they, and developments like the anti-‐gay marriage protests of 2013 in France, indications of a more durable structural shift in the political landscape of the right? What evidence is there to suggest that electoral support can be translated into organizational reserves for UKIP and the FN?
What are the differences in terms of strategy, organizational structure and ideology between populist parties and the far-‐right? What strategies should the left develop to combat their rise? The paper draws on historical studies of the relationship between conservatism and fascism to conclude that the interplay between the two traditions is fluid, providing an assessment of potential outcomes drawing on comparative contemporary and historical analyses of the relationship between political traditions in transition and economic crisis."
Jamie Woodcock
Possibilities for new workplace organisation: workers’ refusal and the challenges for trade unions.
The trade union movement in the UK faces a number of difficult challenges: failing to confront austerity, falling membership, and an inability to relate to precarious workers. The possibilities for overcoming these are often conceived of in terms of trade union renewal or the adoption of an organising model. While these are important perspectives for those
workers already in trade unions, they fail to consider the large number of workers who are not members of trade unions. To address these questions it is necessary to begin with the workplace, rather than the trade union. This paper seeks to explore how the questions of resistance in the workplace can be linked to an organisational strategy through a number of examples. It will consider the role of academic research in relation to workers’ struggle by drawing on the debates on the use of workers’ inquiries, specifically in the Italian Workerist tradition. Mario Tronti’s concept of ‘the strategy of refusal’ will be used to refocus the analysis on the activity of workers themselves and consider the possibilities of new organisational forms. In conclusion, the paper will argue for an intervention into the debates on trade unionism that combines critical theory with emerging examples.
Xavier Wrona
Turning Architectural Thought Processes Against Capital
"""Architecture"" and ""social engineering"" are absolute synonyms. If social engineering designates this by which capitalism proliferates around the globe (D. Harvey, N. Klein), the ""thinking of globality"" as well as the ""ability to implement ideological reforms of the built environment"" that social engineering requires, has historically had only one name: Architecture (D. Hollier).
The totalitarian/totalizing thought process of architecture (systematic thinking, inter-‐proportionality of parts, mastery of details...) has historically been used by Power to implant capitalism (Colonialism/Imperialism), reinforce capitalism (Renaissance), rescue capitalism (Haussmann). Architectural thinking, as both ""construction of mindsets"" and the ""reform of the organization of the territory"" this entails, has demonstrated its mastery of the economy of war: from machines designed by Vitruvius, to the redefinition of warfare on architectural terms operated by Palladio, to Speer's ministry of War during WWII...
If architectural thinking can be applied to other objects than buildings, such as warfare, it could be useful in countering the expansive logics of capital rather than fueling them. We propose means to reorient part of architecture schools trainings away from the production of buildings towards the production of post-‐neo-‐liberal modes of ordering of reality."
Izadora Xavier do Monte
Consumer bodies: queer and class in Brazil's "rolezinhos" "The paper proposes the use of Claire Hemmings' statement of “neo-‐liberalism as precisely not queer” to analyze the phenomenon of Brazil's “rolezinhos”.
Rolezinhos are a brazilian mass movement that have been happening for a couple of years and recently called the media's attention after a police confrotation during one of their demonstrations. At the beginning of 2014, a group of young people from the peripheral areas of São Paulo decided to go in a large group to a central shopping mall, resulting in the
group being stopped by the shopping mall security for no apparent reason, except the fact of their race and social origin. Rolezinhos are scheduled through social networks and they gather circa of twenty people at a time, most of them poor adolescents looking for a leisure time.
The phenomenon of rolezinhos arrive in the moment where the politics of inclusion of the Labour Party of the past twelve years are being criticized. Despite their success in pulling millions of working class people from poverty, the focus on turning the workers into consumers instead of citizens starts to show its limits. Rolezinhos clearly define one of those limits, and allows to think about the limits of neo-‐liberal capitalist and “developmental” discourse in emergent powers such as Brazil.
Liberal discourse advances the thesis that inclusion, difference and multiculturalism are possible once all subject-‐consumer-‐citizens have accepted some basic “rules of the game”. Rolezinhos show that the subject-‐consumer-‐citizen of neoliberal discourse is not so open and multicultural – it has a normativity, a body, and a race. The paper will try to demonstrate how the racialized bodies of youths from the peripheries of São Paulo perform a sort of “class queer” in relation to neo-‐liberal discourse, which doesn't recognize them, and doesn't allow them the privileges of participating in spaces that were promised to be opened by their position as consumers."
Galip Yalman
Different Forms of Reproduction of Labour as “Victims of Privatization”
"The Turkish economy during the 2000s even before the 2008 global financial crisis has been manifesting the symptoms of ‘jobless growth’ as the increases in labour productivity have not been accompanied by an improvement in real wages or labour participation rates under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule. Meanwhile, an ambitious acceleration of the process of privatization by the AKP government, seems to have made the country, an ‘investors’ paradise’ from the perspective of international finance capital. The privatizations of the large-‐scale profitable state economic enterprises (SEEs) were facilitated through legislative changes that favoured foreign and domestic powerful capital groups. However, the actual brunt of this neoliberal assault has been carried by the workers of the privatized companies who tended either to lose their jobs in mass and were deprived of their social rights or were forced to work in conditions that are increasingly perceived to be comparable with the 19th century working conditions of today’s industrialized countries. If the fate of the workers of Tekel tobacco products and alcoholic beveridges monopoly -‐ which was dismantled in order to be privatized -‐ provided a case for the former, the coal miners who paid with their lives for being subjected to the abject conditions of precarity in the recent mining disaster in Soma coal mine could be considered as a saddening example of the latter.
This paper aims to provide a critical review of the deliberate strategies of labour containment by the AKP government which produced different modalities of the reproduction of labour as “victims of privatization” as many workers who suffered the consequences of these strategies have called themselves. Hence, it will attempt to develop an analysis of the case of Tekel workers and Soma coal miners in a comparative framework so as to explore the possibilities for developing counter-‐hegemonic strategies and/or the reasons for lack of them."
Faruk Yalvac
Uneven and Combined Development and Islamic Socio-‐Historical Transformation in the Middle Ages: The Case of the Transition from Umran Badawi to Umran Hadawi in Ibn Khaldun's Thought
This paper analyses the transition from tribal societies to sedentary societies which Ibn Khaldun, the 13th century Muslim historian analysis, explains in his Muqaddima. Khaldun’s main concern is the reason for the rise and fall of dynasties in the 13th century. He analyses this as a struggle between nomadic societies and sedentary societies. This is a cyclical dialectical process enshrined by comparative economic developments between these two tribal forms. The main motivating factor to form a new state is asabiyya or social cohesion stregnthened by the ideological power of Prophecy. However, sedentary societies are eaisly corrupted and suffer from the demoralizing effects of civilization, much like what Rousseau and Marx will describe later. The process is one of uneven and combined development where the uneven development initially attracts the bedouins to attack the sedentary populations but adopt the advantages of combined development by imitating the strengths of the preexisting civilizationb. While this process partially supports the argument of the transhistorical nature of uneven and combined development, it also draws attention to the differences/similarities between the premodern socio-‐historical transformations and the form this assumes with the development of the capitalist mode of production.
Andreas Ytterstad and Helge Ryggvik
Strategies for climate jobs in fossil based economies -‐ the case of Norway
More than 500 people were part of the «Create Green Jobs Now! Put a Brake on Oil Extraction!” section on May Day in Oslo this year. It signaled an ever more recognized alliance between some of the trade unions, environmentalists, and the Norwegian Church, who two months earlier had co organized “The Bridge to the Future – A Climate Solution from Below” Conference. This conference was attended by 350 people in the House of Literature in Oslo, and watched via streaming by more than 1000 people elsewhere in Norway. During the day a completely new word “climatejobs” (#klimajobber14) traded as second only to “Ukraine” in Norway on twitter. Next years conference is already set for March 13th, and it will be bigger.
The authors of this paper have written two small books (Ryggvik, 2013; Ytterstad, 2013) that have played a significant part towards erecting a campaign with the two-‐fold message of May Day. But the popularity of the idea of 100 000 new climate jobs, and the verbal support for cutting Norwegian oil in half, is not the same as actual change. The Norwegian Parliament is just about to open the new Sverdrup Field in the North Sea – which alone will increase emissions by 25 per cent.
This paper is a first attempt to develop into one single article, a reduction and mobilizing strategy for stopping the break-‐neck extraction of Norwegian oil, AND a viable planned intervention to create 100 000 jobs in offshore, wind, transport and buildings. Drawing on previous critiques both of the political economy of oil (Ryggvik 2010) and the hegemony of Norwegian Climate change policy (Nilsen 2001, Ytterstad 2012), the first part of the paper debunks key arguments of the oil-‐industrial complex in Norway (e.g Norwegian “clean” oil and gas is better than coal, or that Norwegian emissions are locked into EU targets anyway). The second part draws on the lessons of the nascent much broader climate movement itself (Ytterstad forthcoming) as well as from the emerging literature of environmental labour studies (Räthzel and Uzzell 2012) to argue for working class agency aided and corrected by other popular forces, like climate justice movements, students involved in divestment campaigns at Norwegian Universities or faith groups. The last part of the paper suggest an action plan before the COP 20 meeting in Paris, which – unlike previous rounds of Summit demonstrations – is squarely focused on national action (cf Hovden and Lindseth 2004). Climate jobs in Norway as bridge towards a renewable Norway, is – we believe – the message that will best strengthen a global campaign for climate jobs to keep carbon in the ground.
Mehmet Yusufoglu
The Cost of Energy-‐material Intensive Economy on Ecology and Labor in Turkey
"The accident in a coal mine in the town Soma in Turkey led to the death of 301 miners. The energy cost or in Marxian terms “the cost of the usage of constant capital” became extremely important since the beginning of the 2000s. For Turkey 1990s were years of internationalization of money-‐capital and 2000s were years of internationalization of productive capital. (F.Ercan)
During the last ten years the energy-‐material intensive structure of the economy has increased. The leading export industries; car production, petro-‐chemical products, iron-‐steel, glass, cement and materials; are main components of the exports. For example, Turkey is the second big cement exporter of the world. The current account deficits due to import dependence of exports and high and floating energy costs made the capital much more aggressive in production of primary products and energy, hence equally aggressive against natural cycles. Mining and energy production became the so called solution for the current account deficit problem and a good excuse. Forced expropriations of farmers for
power plants, brutal mining laws against nature and labor, proliferation of coal burning energy plants and nuclear power investments were guaranteed by many legal regulations and laws.
Trying to compete with Russia ad China; capital used a two layer place oriented strategy. Close markets in Europe and middle east for energy-‐material intensive products was their first aim. Secondly the relative surplus value created depending on the advantage of the place in the energy and mining production became a good opportunity mainly for the capitalist which have closer ties with the developmentalist neoliberal government who wants the create support its own scattered capital against the old finance capital groups which are still dominant in Turkish economy. These new capitalists exploited their close relations in getting licenses and permits for commodification of natural resources and cycles. So there is a intra class struggle parameter in the event. The widely discussed importance of construction sector and the urbanization rent was a complementary of this energy-‐material intensive structure. Uneven urbanization became main sources of income distribution problems.
Other than the energy cost, low cost of labor power ( increased subcontractor relations in production processes, chemicalisation of food, delayed and covered damage of environmental problems on workers, poor working and safety conditions, increased effectiveness of social aid and social services for low wage earners and precarious workers) is especially necessary for service sectors in the city and subcontractors of the main export industries. The costs of products of subcontracting companies ( e.g. producers of car parts) are important factors in external competition.
Hence the energy cost and labor cost reduction policies combined in Soma coal mines. The 301 miners who lost their lives were producing cheap energy for construction sector and mainly export industries which try to ease the cost of floating energy prices and exchange values which increases energy costs. Unequal ecological and economic exchange matters in multi-‐scales."
Ivan Zambrana-‐Flores
A short and unwinding road: State, indigenous, and environmental contradictions in Plurinational Bolivia
Hidden under the haze of the latest Latin America’s left turn, and amidst the realities and fantasies of a promised post-‐neoliberalism, old contentions are emerging anew in Bolivia. Tensions over development paradigms and territorial rights have caused the relationship between indigenous organizations and the self-‐declared pro-‐poor Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government of Evo Morales’ party to deteriorate; incongruously, against the backdrop of a government’s international campaign for the rights of Mother Earth. Most observers point towards hegemonic pragmatism on the part of the MAS as the root of these
conflicts, especially as regards overlapping territorial claims, extractive frontiers and large infrastructure projects. In this article, we analyze the TIPNIS conflict –around a planned road through a protected area– as a case study to shed light on the deeper sources and dynamics of conflict as identified from a political ecology perspective. More attention needs to be devoted to the internal contradictions of environmental and indigenist discourses, instead of solely focusing critiques on inconsistency in government policies.
Carlos Zamora
The paradox of modernization: the alleged territorial hegemony of the Brazilian state against capital's structural crisis
Aiming at a theoretical and critical analysis of the Brazilian´s development our approach aims to contribute to an analysis of current power relations and the prominent role that Latin America, represented by Brazil, can play in setting another new world order. Redeem the historical dimension of socioeconomic life, reduced by immediate interests that consolidates power relations, is to assert that any contribution to the critique of International Political Economy not expend effort to emphasize the paradox of modernity is just a baseless justification for restoration of bubbles financial characteristics of a system that was built on the pillars of inequality and monetary rationality. After power relations underlie the idea that underdevelopment is the reverse of the development and the two poles are the same historical field. Therefore, only with an International Political Economy, which prioritizes the principle of interdependence , can engender the actual development
Andreja Zivkovic
Towards a Critique of Euro-‐Marxism
"This paper will focus on one aspect of the crisis of left alternatives, namely the failure to address the national question(s) at the heart of European integration. We will argue that this aporia is symptomatic of the interpellation of the left as political subject by the European ideology, resulting in an inversion in which the critique of the political economy takes on the form of its opposite, the dominant market ideology, and becomes purely apolitical criticism. We call this theory Euro-‐Marxism after the great Austro-‐Marxist school of thought. It may be characterized by the belief in the progressive character of great economic ensembles which are held to unite the collective worker and decouple the nation from the state, culture from politics. To merely take the post-‐Yugoslav variant of this ideology, the national question is erased, imperial domination ignored, and all that is left is apolitical criticism. More generally, Euro-‐Marxism takes the institutions of the European Union as the indispensable and privileged level of reform, a level that in fact does not exist since neo-‐liberalism is hardwired into an institutional fortress beyond all spaces of democratic representation. As a result, critical theory bifurcates in the direction both of utopianism and of neo-‐Kantian adaptation to the European ideology. Instead we consider
the nation-‐state as a ‘weak link’, a space of the condensation, articulation and displacement of the contradictions of capitalist accumulation within the European empire, and thus the starting point for the conceptualization of political strategy proper; and dialectically, the only points from which one can pose the questions of national self-‐determination and the transformation of economic relations for Europe as a whole.
Luciana Zorzoli
What does structural reforms meant to worker's organizations? The impact of neoliberalism in the trade union model in Argentina.
"Despite a longstanding tradition in the marxist study of neoliberalism and the impact of structural reforms on trade union structure, there are still a wealth of important aspects to be studied in Latin America since neoliberalism has succeeded in promoting massive changes in most of the relevant areas that frame trade union structure: industrial relations including the labour market and workforce composition (unemployment, precarization, outsourcing), labour/state relations, and the form of the state.
This paper aims them to bring light, along the roots of actual trade union structures in Argentina. We will critically review academic production and challenge their understanding of the trade unions model through a case where all this tensions have been revealed: the murder of Mariano Ferreyra, a young grass root activist by members of ""Unión Ferroviaria"" the Railways trade union. The judicial case (that lead its general secretary among others to conviction in 2012) will show how this ""business unionism"" was formed and will allow us to discuss structural changes in workers organizations stemming from neoliberal reforms and the last dictatorship."
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