Revolution and Restoration

ROME

REVOLUTION AND RESTORATION

Historical Materialism Rome Conference 2015

17-18-19 September 2015, Roma Tre University

CALL FOR PAPERS

D​EADLINE: 26.03.2015

Details: https://hmrome2015.wordpress.com
​

Two hundreds years after the Vienna Congress, a new strategy of restoration has imposed itself at the core of Europe. The process of reorganization of class power, which started in the 1970s, has stabilised after the 2007-2008 crisis on the basis of austerity policies, the dismantling of workers’ rights and the welfare state , the contraction of democratic space, and punitive restrictions on the right to protest. We know the 1815 restoration was a reaction to the revolutionary conquests of 1789; can we say something analogous about this new restoration? Does this latter amount merely to a response to the attack launched by the subaltern classes in the ’60 -’70? Can we define neoliberalism, as David Harvey suggests, as the ‘restoration of class power?’.

What deserves further exploration is the extent to which neoliberal restoration has acquired the offensive and constitutive dynamic traditionally linked to the concept of ‘revolution’. The interrelation between restoration and revolution emerges, in part, from the composition, nature and unfolding of the struggles that characterize our times: urban movements claim ing a ‘right to the city’, border conflicts, migrant struggles, the constellation of Arab ‘springs’, independent and conflictual trade unionism, experiments in workers’ self-management, feminist, queer and decolonial movements, rural, indigenous and environmental struggles .

Can these new struggles contrast the neoliberal manipulation of those democratic forms that emerged from the post-war compromise between labour and capital, and between direct and representative democracy? Can new subjectivities, new rights from below, new institutions offer any foothold for detaching the idea of ‘revolution’ from its absorption by the mechanism of ‘restoration’? Within this complex and stratified framework, it is crucial to take-up the traditions of Marxist theory – from the in-depth analysis of Bonapartism by Marx and Engels to Workerism, passing through Gramsci and the reflections on the appropriation and subordination of anti-colonial movements – that have distinguished themselves by their capacity to interrogate the deep connection between revolution and restoration in the history of the capitalist social totality.

Separate calls go out for the following streams (click on titles for full CFPs):

​Marxism and Philosophy: The Italian Debate and its International Effects

New World Disorder: Crisis, Conflicts and Transformations of Class Struggles 

Powers, Organizational forms, New Institutions

​T​he Right to the City​

We welcome abstract proposals on these themes or any others, in all disciplines, from all continents and from all perspectives within Marxism.

Please send your 200 words abstracts to: hmrome2015@gmail.com

IMPORTANT: if you apply to any of the 4 strands listed above, add the title of the strand in your email subject.

First Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/historical-materialism-rome-conference-2015-call-for-papers

Neoliberalism

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Historical Materialism Sydney Conference 2014

Communisation

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM SYDNEY CONFERENCE 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS

STATES, SOCIAL REPRODUCTION, CAPITAL

We call this conference in a historical moment marked, at the level of public discourse, above all by uncertainty in the face of a continuing crisis of both capitalist production and the ideological, political and social forms that have hitherto underpinned it. This uncertainty is expressed, implicitly or explicitly, not just by the managers, functionaries and prognosticators of capital and state, but also by those movements that claim to systemically oppose it.  Additionally, our conference coincides with the centennial of the outbreak of World War I.

Eulogies to bravery aside, this conjuncture – of present distemper and historical disaster – allows us to ask again, and hopefully ask differently, many of the questions considered central to the broad Marxist tradition. The Great War, for many in that tradition, marked the spectacular limit point or exhaustion of a particular configuration of capital accumulation, the result of which – as figures as preeminent as Engels had prophesied – could only be bloody. To what extent do we face a similar limit point today, even if we have thus far been spared the scale of sacrificial slaughter of that previous one?

This question cannot be answered by scholars and activists operating in isolation; instead, it requires sustained theoretical and practical activity across virtually the entire field of Marxist research and practice: the critique of political economy opening out to critiques of the state; examinations of the relationship between the state, capital, and the social movements that contest both; investigations into the specificity of class and its relation to other structural forms of oppression; considerations of the nature and form that a communist revolution will take today (1914 marking too, of course, the failure of one such conception); interrogations of the relevance of imperialism and settler colonialism to the current conjuncture; and critical analyses of the production of nature on a world-scale. To answer or even just correctly pose these questions requires an engagement with Marxism’s multifarious inheritances, but will also imply openness to new data, integration with the experience of new social struggles, and fresh theoretical perspectives informed by these.

We ask for submissions of 250 word abstracts for papers on these and other topics that engage with this broader tradition, critically or otherwise; panel proposals should include short abstracts for each paper coupled with an outline of the panel as a whole. We especially welcome contributions from activists and scholars outside of (or peripheral to) the academy.

 

All submissions should be emailed to hmaustralasia [at] gmail.com.

Website: https://hmaustralasia.org/2014/04/15/historical-materialism-australasia-2014-states-social-reproduction-capital/

 

**END**

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International Gramsci Society – Call for Papers

Antonio Gramsci

INTERNATIONAL GRAMSCI SOCIETY – CALL FOR PAPERS

International Gramsci Society 

Rethinking Marxism 2013 Conference
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
19-22 September 2013

The International Gramsci Society (USA) is organizing a number of panels for the Rethinking Marxism 2013 Conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

As part of the RM 2013 Conference, we invite members of the IGS community to submit paper proposals on topics related to Gramscian studies and to the application of Gramsci’s ideas.

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS
Proposals for papers should include:
* Paper title
* Presenter’s name, affiliation, and contact information (email, phone)
* Brief abstract (no more than 200 words)

Please send proposals to:
Marcus E. Green (marcusgreen@gmail.com)
Subject: RM-IGS Proposal

Deadline for proposal submissions: 31 May 2013.

For more information on the Rethinking Marxism 2013 Conference, see: http://www.rethinkingmarxism.org/RM2013

Rethinking Marxism is a journal of economics, culture & society: http://www.rethinkingmarxism.org/

Best wishes,
Marcus E. Green
Secretary, International Gramsci Society
Co-Chair, Rethinking Marxism 2013 Conference

First published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/call-for-papers-igs-panels-for-rethinking-marxism-2013-deadline-31-may-2013

**END**

 

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Marx at the Movies Conference

Lev Kulidzhanov's 'Karl Marx: The Early Years'

MARX AT THE MOVIES CONFERENCE

Dear All

This is a Call for Papers for a Conference on Marx and cinema that we are hosting at the University of Central Lancashire. We would really appreciate if you post it on various notice boards and forward it to friends and colleagues. Thanks.

Hope to as many of you in Preston next year!

Best wishes, Lars
—

Call for Papers
Marx at the Movies Conference
University of Central Lancashire
March 16-17, 2012

As the Lehmans Brothers filled for bankruptcy on September 15 2008 an era came to a halt. No more was there a belief that ‘the Market’ would work for the greater good as long as it was left un-regulated. As the belief in neoliberal theory and practice collapsed, many turned to the alternative theory – that of Marxism, not least because for Marx the challenge for human thought was not simply to understand the world but to change it.

Not for the first time Marx is ‘fashionable’. As David Harvey observes in his introduction to The Communist Manifesto: ‘The Communist Manifesto of 1847 is an extraordinary document, full of insights, rich in meanings and bursting with political possibilities. Millions of people all around the world – peasants, workers, soldiers, intellectuals as well as professionals of all sorts – have, over the years, been touched and inspired by it.’

The same can be said about filmmakers, film academics and students, in view of the fact that cinema, as a collective endeavour and as an industrial art, is an excellent ground to test Marxist dialectical thought. But how has cinema engaged with Marxist theory and practice? How has cinema engaged in processes to create radical social transformation, including decolonisation and the liberation of women? Is there a revival of Marxism in contemporary film theory and practice?

These are some of the questions we want to discuss during the two-day conference, hosted by theSchool ofJournalism, Media and Communication inPreston – a town of great importance to the history of the working class, as testified by Marx and Engels’ writings.

 

Papers are sought for topics such as:

* The problems of conveying Marxist thought on screen (including attempts to screen Capital)

* Representation of alienated and non-alienated labour and capital on screen

* The work of Sergei Eisenstein, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, Dušan Makavejev, Satyajit Ray, Ousmane Sembène, Alexander Kluge, Ken Loach, Lars von Trier. Are they Marxist filmmakers?

* Western and Eastern Marxist film theory and history Socialist production, distribution and exhibition of films

* Marxism, Third cinema and the cinema of revolt

* Marxism and feminist cinema

* Marxism, realism and non-realism

* Screen images of Marx, Engels and Lenin

Organising committee:
Professor Ewa Mazierska
Dr. Anandi Ramamurthy
Dr. Lars Kristensen

Deadline for abstracts (max 250 words): 1 December 2011.
Please send abstracts to Ewa Mazierska EHMazierska@uclan.ac.uk Or Lars Kristensen LLFKristensen@uclan.ac.uk

Notice: The conference is not expected to produce a surplus value

 

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Marxism and Cultural Studies

Cultural Marxism

MARXISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Call for Essays: Culture, Theory and Critique special themed issue on Marxism and Cultural Studies (special thanks to Indiana University’s Cultural Studies Program)

Many accounts of the emergence and development of Cultural Studies accord a central place to Marxism, both as a body of knowledge and as an important ideological component of the New Left. The rediscovery of the writings of Antonio Gramsci, George Luckacs, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, among others, along with the formation of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, led to a general renaissance of Marxist theory and cultural analysis, which in turn resulted in ground-breaking studies of working class culture, the political role of new social movements that were not class based, the power of ideology and mass culture in sustaining existing social relations, and critical analyses of state-authoritarianism. As Cultural Studies crossed the Atlantic and gained an institutional foothold in the United States, some have feared that its engagement with Marxism has been diluted through an over emphasis on the subversive potentialities of mass media and consumer capitalism.

Some possible questions to consider:

 * How do we understand the relationship between the base and superstructure today?

* Does ideology critique still have an ongoing usefulness?

* Do globalization and the world recession require new objects of study?

* To what extent does Marxism provide a utopian impulse for existing social movements?

* Do iterations of Cultural Studies in South Asia, Africa, Central and Latin America, the Middle East, and
Eastern Europe retain a commitment to Marxism and how is this work revitalizing the field more broadly?

* Does the Marxist imperative to historicize challenge current paradigms of cultural analysis such as
the “New Formalism”?

* What exactly does a historical materialist methodology enable?

* How do we articulate media analyses with questions of political economy, geo-politics, and activism?

* What is the role of the intellectual in Cultural Studies?

We welcome essays that address any of these issues. The questions are not meant to be proscriptive, however, and we welcome queries about possible article content.

Abstracts (250-500 words) due September 15, 2011; final essays need to be submitted for peer review by October 31, 2011. Length 5,000-7,000 words including notes.

Send proposals and essays to Joan Hawkins, editor and Jen Heusel, editorial assistant ctcjourn@indiana.edu

Culture, Theory and Critique is a refereed, interdisciplinary journal for the transformation and development of critical theories in the humanities and social sciences. It aims to critique and reconstruct theories by interfacing them with one another and by relocating them in new sites and conjunctures. Culture, Theory and Critique’s approach to theoretical refinement and innovation is one of interaction and hybridisation via recontextualisation and transculturation.

 

‘Culture, Theory and Critique’: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/14735784.html

 

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Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory (CFP on Rosa Luxemburg)

Rosa Luxemburg

Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory (CFP on Rosa Luxemburg)

Call for Papers on Rosa Luxemburg

2012 Special Issue: Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg Call for Articles

 

Born in Tsarist Poland in 1871, she emigrated to Germany and became one of the most inspirational figures of the Second International. Luxemburg arrived in Berlin in the spring of 1898 in time join the Revisionist debates, which made her famous as a Marxist theoretician. Time and again Luxemburg proved herself as a gifted orator, inspiring workers to join the socialist movement, as well as she a talented theoretician, attempting to expand Marx’s work and make it relevant to  early 20th century movement. However, Rosa Luxemburg was and remains a controversial figure. To mark the 140th anniversary of Rosa  Luxemburg’s birth, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory will be  producing a special issue on and around Luxemburg’s works and her legacy.

The special issue would like to examine some of her most well known works (such as the Russian Revolution, Mass Strike, National Question, and Organisational Question, Accumulation of Capital) and address their relevance to today.

What is Rosa Luxemburg’s legacy?

Is her work still relevant today?

During a time of economic crisis, does Luxemburg’s work, Accumulation of Capital have anything to offer the 21st century?

Why does Luxemburg continue to inspire?

 

Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory welcomes contributions covering any aspect of Marxist political economy, philosophy and history.

Articles should not normally exceed 7-8,000 words in length.  

Articles  must include an abstract of no more than 300 words and a maximum of 6  key words.  Please note that Critique does not use the Harvard system  and expects footnotes to appear at the bottom of the page. For further instructions and advice for authors please visit: http://www.informaworld.com/critique

For further details about Critique visit: http://www.critiquejournal.net/. The final deadline for articles is  December 1, 2011. Please send articles via email to the special issue  editor:  Dr. Lea Haro, gziinfo@udcf.gla.ac.uk and to: critique@eng.gla.ac.uk

 

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Capital Against Capitalism – Conference

A Crisis of Capital

CAPITAL AGAINST CAPITALISM

– CALL FOR PAPERS – CALL FOR PAPERS – CALL FOR PAPERS –

Capital Against Capitalism
A conference of new Marxist research
Saturday 25 June 2011
Central Sydney, Australia

It seems significant, and hardly coincidental, that the impasse that politics fell into after the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the eclipse of Marx and the research project of historical materialism. Social democracy, various left-wing melancholies and/ or the embrace of dead political forms has stood-in for these absent names. Returning to Marx, to Capital and to the various traditions tied-up with these names may present a way to cut across this three-fold deadlock.

We invite papers responding to contemporary politics from a range of historical materialist perspectives. We want to bring together the theoretical discussions and debates occurring in Capital reading groups, PhD study circles, and Marxist political organisations and networks. Our conjuncture – its manifold crisis – urges new analyses, new strategic orientations and the engagement of activists and academics alike on these questions.

Conference Structure
The conference will involve two plenaries and four workshops. There will be space for 12 workshop papers about, or connected to, the conference theme. We are happy to receive proposals for themed workshops of three papers, with the caveat that we may need to alter suggested panels or reject individual papers to ensure overall timetabling.

In our opening plenary, Rick Kuhn will overview the argument of his new book, with Tom Bramble, Labor’s conflict: big business, workers and the politics of class (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Geoff Robinson and Tad Tietze will act as respondents. The final session will be a keynote address from Nicole Pepperell on the key ideas of her PhD thesis and forthcoming book on Marx’s Capital (to be published by Brill, as part of the Historical Materialism Book Series, later this year).

In all sessions there will be time for contributions from conference participants. To maximise discussion at the conference, each first plenary and workshop speaker will have 15 minutes to overview their paper.

Proposals for Papers
Proposals for papers should be submitted by 15 March 2011 to Elizabeth Humphrys lizhumphrys@me.com and Jonathon Collerson jonathoncollerson@gmail.com. Authors should also indicate whether they would be submitting a written paper for refereeing. 
Papers should be 1500, and no longer than 1800 words. Refereed conference papers will be published, potentially also as a special issue of an academic journal. We reserve the right to reject papers if we have too many to fill the allocated slots, or they are deemed unsuitable, but we will do our best to accommodate everyone.

Key Dates
1 February – Call for papers
15 March – Abstracts due
1 May – Papers due for refereeing; conference timetable released
1 June – Feedback to authors
25 June – Conference

Other details
The conference will be held in Central Sydney, in easy reach of public transport and in an accessible location. There will be a small conference fee, of approximately $20-$30 on average, to cover the cost of lunches and travel costs for the interstate speakers. Full details to follow. If you require childcare please contact us to discuss this by 1 June 2011. The conference organisers will not be arranging billeting, but please contact us if you are unable to arrange your own accommodation option. As the conference has no outside funding source, we will be unable to cover travel costs for workshop presenters.

Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=104092856334915

Elizabeth Humphrys and Jonathon Collerson (obo the organising group)

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Historical Materialism Conference 2010: Extended Abstract Deadline

Karl Marx

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM CONFERENCE 2010

Extended Abstract Deadline

Due to high demand, the deadline for submitting abstracts for the 2010 Historical Materialism Conference in London has now been extended to 1 JULY 2010. This will be the last extension.

‘Crisis and Critique’: Historical Materialism Annual London Conference 2010,

Central London, Thursday 11th to Sunday 14th November*

Call for Papers

Notwithstanding repeated invocations of the ‘green shoots of recovery’, the effects of the economic crisis that began in 2008 continue to be felt around the world. While some central tenets of the neoliberal project have been called into question, bank bailouts, cuts to public services and attacks on working people’s lives demonstrate that the ruling order remains capable of imposing its agenda. Many significant Marxist analyses have already been produced of the origins, forms and prospects of the crisis, and we look forward to furthering these debates at HM London 2010. We also aim to encourage dialogue between the critique of political economy and other modes of criticism – ideological, political, aesthetic, philosophical – central to the Marxist tradition.

In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht projected a journal to be called ‘Crisis and Critique’. In very different times, but in a similar spirit, HM London 2010 aims to serve as a forum for dialogue, interaction and debate between different strands of critical-Marxist theory. Whether their focus is the study of the capitalist mode of production’s theoretical and practical foundations, the unmasking of its ideological forms of legitimation or its political negation, we are convinced that a renewed and politically effective Marxism will need to rely on all the resources of critique in the years ahead. Crises produce periods of ideological and political uncertainty. They are moments that put into question established cognitive and disciplinary compartmentalisations, and require a recomposition at the level of both theory and practice. HM London 2010 hopes to contribute to a broader dialogue on the Left aimed at such a recomposition, one of whose prerequisites remains the young Marx’s call for the ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’.

We are seeking papers that respond to the current crisis from a range of Marxist perspectives, but also submissions that try to think about crisis and critique in their widest ramifications. HM will also consider proposals on themes and topics of interest to critical-Marxist theory not directly linked to the call for papers (we particularly welcome contributions on non-Western Marxism and on empirical enquiries employing Marxist methods).

While Historical Materialism is happy to receive proposals for panels, the editorial board reserves the right to change the composition of panels or to reject individual papers from panel proposals. We also expect all participants to attend the whole conference and not simply make ‘cameo’ appearances. We cannot accommodate special requests for specific slots or days, except in highly exceptional circumstances.

*Please note that, in order to allow for expected demand, this year the conference will be three and a half days’ long, starting on the Thursday afternoon.

Please submit a title and abstract of between 200 and 300 words by registering at: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual7/submit by 1 JULY 2010

Possible themes include:

•       Crisis and left recomposition

•       Critique and crisis in the global south

•       Anti-racist critique

•       Marxist and non-Marxist theories of crisis

•       Capitalist and anti-capitalist uses of the crisis

•       Global dimensions of the crisis

•       Comparative and historical accounts of capitalist crisis

•       Ecological and economic crisis

•       Critical theory today

•       Finance and the crisis

•       Neoliberalism and legitimation crisis

•       Negation and negativity

•       Feminism and critique

•       Political imaginaries of crisis and catastrophe

•       The critique of everyday life (Lefebvre, the Situationists etc.)

•       The idea of critique in Marx, his predecessors and contemporaries

•       Art criticism, political critique and the critique of political economy

•       Geography and crisis, geography and the critique of political economy

•       Right-wing movements and crisis

•       Critiques of the concept of crisis

•       New forms of critique in the social and human sciences

•       Aesthetic critique

•       Marxist literary and cultural criticism

•       Reports on recent evolution of former USSR countries and China

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