Décalages

Décalages polylingual Althusser studies journal

26/11/2024

This event took place online on November 16, 2024. The speakers included Jared Bly, Natalia Romé, and Jonathan Fardy. Danielle Kutner was the moderator. For ...

Let's get some Althusser panels happening!
23/11/2024

Let's get some Althusser panels happening!

CALL FOR PAPERS

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM ATHENS CONFERENCE 2025

ORGANISING IN THE CAPITALOCENE
Labour and the Struggle against Disaster and Genocide

24-27 April 2025
Panteion University, Athens

Deadline for submissions: 15 December 2024

We now live in a world of genocide and disaster. That we are witnessing the Israeli war machine destroying Gaza and attacking Lebanon while the Earth is crossing one ‘climate-change’ threshold after another suggests that catastrophe is becoming the ‘new normal’ of contemporary capitalism.

From orchestrating a genocidal project to escalating inter-imperialist rivalry and the militarisation of societies, from the cynical refusal to act against the worst aspects of an environmental collapse (no longer impending but actual) to treating the vast majority of the global population as an expendable factor of production and to openly endorsing all sorts of patriarchal and racist positions, the reality of contemporary capitalism is unbearable. It makes radical social change from below more urgent than ever.

If Capitalocene – a term that specifies the cause of our predicament- implies transition to a historical period where capital turns into a force solely of destruction, without any claims to some ‘positive’ hegemonic project, then collective resistance is the sole barrier to extinction. The question is how to organise this resistance, how to make it capable of reversing processes of destruction that now seem almost unstoppable. Such an endeavour is all the more difficult in the current political conjuncture. Following a decade of popular uprisings and anti-austerity political projects occasionally engaging governmental power, the protracted crisis of strategy in the Left has now turned into a wholesale strategic impasse that allows ever newer versions of far-right and ultra-libertarian projects to present themselves as credible responses to the anxieties of the popular masses.

We must not forget that at the heart of this complex ensemble of antagonisms and conflicts, which turn the Capitalocene into a global disaster zone, remains labour, class, and exploitation. Against efforts to present the capitalist economy as an endless flow of commodities and assets, as a process of self-produced (and in times of crisis, self-destroyed) value, capitalism must be seen for what it is: a system of exploitation of living labour. In the vortex of new for-profit technologies and the further precarisation and intensification of labour, as new waves of struggle are met with new waves of repression, the reality of labour tends to be sidelined. And yet, only capital’s drive towards the full exploitation of labour, in all its aspects, can explain both the unstoppable depletion of anything identified as ‘resources’ and the unleashing of all forms of violence against societies and nature.

In terms of exploitation, in terms of struggle and organising, labour provides the common ‘red thread’ that explains the dynamics of contemporary capitalism and imperialism while pointing to how we can bring together social forces, movements and resistances into a common project of survival and emancipation. It is labour’s resistance and struggle that really makes a difference in crucial moments: from refusing to load weapons for the Israeli war machine to exposing the devastating impact of fossil capitalism, from creating spaces of solidarity for the subaltern to forming movements that battle capital’s incursions in everyday life, from cities to the countryside.

In saying this, we do not forget the complex and multi-layered character of the contemporary condition of subalternity, the intertwining of production and social reproduction, as well as the many intersections between labour, gender, race, ethnicity, ableness and nature; nor do we deny the relative autonomy of diverse struggles in their proper conjunctural singularity. We see the need for a united front of struggles than cannot be limited to labour, and the urgency for a new internationalism against the cynicism of contemporary imperialism and settler-colonialism. All the above remain connected to essential aspects of a politics of labour -a politics that sees social transformation from below as a labour of struggle, solidarity, and care. Organising is, precisely, this labour of struggle, solidarity and care. By organising, we fight for unity and against re-emerging tendencies of disaggregation, fragmentation and despair. Organising is the answer to capital’s ability to act strategically and coordinate disaster through the State. Organising is the way to create laboratories of new forms of militant intellectuality and strategy, spaces of prefiguration and experimental terrains for new social configurations.

The Critical Marxist tradition provides the framework for this discussion, and for revisiting strategic challenges that remain open questions, by means of renewing collective and militant thought. Historical Materialism Athens offers a meeting place for sharing perspectives on organising against capital’s piling disasters, against the subjugation of labour, and against the genocide suffered by the Palestinian people. Fostering an egalitarian ethos among delegates and rejecting dogmatism, Historical Materialism Athens welcomes comradely dialogue and debate to nurture theoretical advances but also collective projects.

To that end, Historical Materialism Athens 2025 welcomes paper and panel proposals on

- the articulation of genocide and extinction as manifestations of the violence inscribed at the core of contemporary capitalism
- the persistence of racialised forms of exploitation, expropriation and oppression, up to and including genocide
- the contemporary condition of labour: changes in the labour process, new forms of precarisation, the push for constant surveillance, and the social and political composition of labour
- the challenges faced by efforts to rethink the possibility of a politics of labour as an antagonistic political practice and how they can be overcome
- the new articulations between technology, capital and labour, including the multiple challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence
- the contemporary landscapes of workers’ resistance in all its expressions; forms of collective organising and struggle, their broader impact, obstacles and prospects
- the paths towards building new forms of unity of the subaltern in the latter’s intersectional constitution through class, gendering, racialisation, ableness; thinking across exploitation and oppression in concrete social contexts
- the gains of fascism against the backdrop of labour movements’ suppression and ways to undo these gains; the new ‘pact’ between fascism and capital
- Imperialism, geopolitics, and labour in the 21st century
- Marxist strategy against capitalist strategy from State politics to everyday life

Whilst we encourage papers and panels that address these themes, as always, the Historical Materialism conference seeks to provide a space for critical Marxist theory and research across the globe and a range of disciplines and interests, so submissions on other themes are welcome.

In addition to the central thematic of this year’s conference, we welcome paper and panel proposals for the following streams (CfPs are issued separately):

- Marxist Feminism, Gender and Sexuality Stream
- Socio-Environmental Stream: Towards a Radical Eco-Socialist Praxis
- Technology, Automation, and Resistance
- Migration

Individual proposals for papers and panels must include:
i) Names of participants with e-mails, and institutional affiliations. Where there is more than one participant, we require a clear indication of a corresponding author.
ii) Title and abstract of the paper or panel. In the case of a paper, please submit an abstract of no longer than 300 words. In the case of a panel, please submit an overarching description of 300 words, names and details of each participant and abstracts for individual papers. Ditto for book launches/panels.

The deadline for submissions is 15 December 2024.

Partial submissions may be rejected.

Submit your paper or panel proposal in the form you will find in the comments section.

For all inquiries contact: [email protected]
For details visit our website: https://hmathens.org/

19/11/2024

Now that Bluesky is gaining some traction it seems like a good time to remind our followers here that we are on Bluesky as well.

An Althusser Studies Journal decalagesjournal.org

The thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Warren Montag's first book slipped by me, it was last month (September 1...
22/10/2024

The thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Warren Montag's first book slipped by me, it was last month (September 1994). If you haven't read it yet there are plenty of new copies for sale on the internet at various places, and perhaps even in actual bookstores. I remember seeing it in the old Verso catalogue (with a different subtitle) and then buying a copy a year later in the ANU Book Shop (29 years ago). I read it immediately before sending an email to Warren straight after, as we were on the old Spoons Collective Marxism-L together, which in 1995 was an unmoderated list that provided each member with the email address of every other member, lurkers like Warren included ... definitely the start of something!

David McInerney

No major figure of the English Augustan period has generated stronger and more contradictory views than Jonathan Swift. Scourge of the Whig ascendancy in his own day, vilified by the Victorians, celebrated by Yeats, he has in recent years become a significant bone of contention for prominent figures...

22/10/2024

The philosopher Étienne Balibar reads and discusses Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach and Ernst Bloch’s Commentary from The Principle of Hope for Marx 1/13 ...

01/10/2024

The editors of Décalages are pleased to announce that the journal, after a long interruption, is finally back online, and our new site, decalagesjournal.org, includes every past issue. We plan to publish our next issue in June 2025, and are now accepting submissions for articles, book reviews, and special issues. Any inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

23/07/2024

Décalages journal website relaunch coming in September 2024

04/06/2024

TO THE HEART OF IT: Gaza has been a free kill zone and a “concentration camp” (to quote Israel’s National Security Director Giora Eiland in 2004), long before October 7. In light of this, the most radical position comes directly from the simplest question: are Palestinians human beings? If your a...

In On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Louis Althusser cited an appendix which, it seems, remains lost or was never compl...
03/06/2024

In On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Louis Althusser cited an appendix which, it seems, remains lost or was never completed. This appendix was titled ‘the Ideology of Work’.
This book takes inspiration from this appendix, to think about what is at stake for both Marxism and sociology in analysing work from an Althusserian perspective today. The dominant form of this ideology of work today is theoretical humanism. This book demonstrates how theoretical humanism has undermined the analysis of work and makes the case for a Marxism in sociology with a committed theoretical anti-humanism at the forefront of its endeavour.

31/05/2024

It has become a truism to say that “everything is political.” But what does the political mean? Answering this question leads to divergent approaches and major disagreements. Philosophy, Politics, and Critique (PPC) celebrates this plurality holding that it is indispensable to adopting a critica...

This call for papers may be of interest to some of us.
30/05/2024

This call for papers may be of interest to some of us.

PDF of program and other details Foucault and Marx Ambivalences, Legacies, and Future Struggles International Symposium 18–19 October 2024 University of Vienna, Austria The symposium aims to explor…

20/05/2024
Fredric Jameson's The Years of Theory looks to be another massive magnum opus, but unlike previous ones on utopia and di...
17/05/2024

Fredric Jameson's The Years of Theory looks to be another massive magnum opus, but unlike previous ones on utopia and dialectics it appears to be all new material--the products of one(?) seminar.

10/05/2024

While the explicit Althusserian engagement with Marx’s Capital remained largely limited to Reading Capital, after 1968, Nick Nesbitt argues, this theoretical...

Contains essays by Warren Montag, Jason Read, Hasana Sharp, and others.  Free download as PDF or EPUB.
04/05/2024

Contains essays by Warren Montag, Jason Read, Hasana Sharp, and others. Free download as PDF or EPUB.

It has become a truism to say that “everything is political.” But what does the political mean? Answering this question leads to divergent approaches and major disagreements. Philosophy, Politics, and Critique (PPC) celebrates this plurality holding that it is indispensable to adopting a critica...

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