Danish Society for Marxist Studies Ninth Annual Conference

Description

The last half of the twentieth century saw the traditional industrial working class in the West decompose and its institutions suffer a series of decisive defeats. This has left a growing number of “surplus populations” exposed to the naked imperatives of neoliberalism and increasingly militarised policing of intersecting hierarchies of class, race, gender, and colonialism.

These developments have shattered traditional ideas of the working class as the unified subject of history, but it has not necessarily changed its contents. Marx already identified the proletariat as a (non-)class defined solely by its lack of access to the means of reproducing its existence independently and whose emancipation could therefore only be realised through its self-abolition. Moreover, subsequent dissidents in the workers’ movement have long emphasised the interlocking contradictions of racialization, sexism, and colonialism that underpin and structure classical conceptions of the working class in an effort to overcome them. Such contradictions have increasingly come to the fore in recent struggles against capitalist forms of exploitation, oppression, appropriation, exclusion, incarceration, and extermination across the globe.

So where are we now? What happens to Marxist theories of class when we take such interlocking contradictions seriously? For this conference, we encourage contributions that critically engage with the intersections and interactions of class and other forms of classification. Our ambition is to bring about an undogmatic meditation on the concept of “class” and its limits, its theoretical underpinnings across historically and geographically shifting political and economic realities, and its practical — that is to say, political — consequences.

Period	4 Oct 2024 → 5 Oct 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Copenhagen, DenmarkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International