The Marxist Literary Group’s Institute on Culture and Society 2024
June 11–15
SaINT JAMES UNITED CHURCH, Montreal
Capital, Imperialism, and Racism
‘Extirpation, enslavement, entombment’ – according to Marx, ‘these idyllic proceedings’ characterized capital’s founding means of accumulation, while ‘the commercial wars of imperial nations [continue to] have the globe as their battlefield’ (Capital I). The ICS 2024 will pose the question: what is the relation between capital, imperialism, and racism today?
Marxism has a rich tradition of analyzing the relation between capital and imperialism, including the early-century classics, mid-century anti-colonial liberation theories, Dependency and World Systems Theory. In recent years, these analyses and ensuing debates have been revived to explore the ongoing efficacy of imperialism as a category to understand how an increasingly stagnation- and (consequently) crisis-ridden world market sets capital – notably, in its political form as nation-state – in search of territory, resources, and investment opportunities for a national capitalist class. At all stages of capital’s history, the inner movement of value becoming capital takes the outward expression of geopolitical rivalries and a deadly chess game of imperial war.
Marxism likewise has a rich, if rather more vexed, tradition of analyzing the relation between capital and racism, a tradition that has seen significant advances in recent years – often in the form of a ‘return’ to classical theorists in the Black radical tradition. We have seen, for instance, a groundswell of Marxist analysis of the way in which capital's immanent drive to augment relative surplus value mobilizes hierarchies of racialized identity in the production of differential values of labor power. Capital’s two-sided crisis of surplus capital and racialized surplus population creates migrant populations violently ‘set free’ from the means of subsistence and then subjected to the tyranny of far-right ethno-nationalist regimes and their newly emboldened campaigns of racism.
Despite this rich and varied tradition and its ongoing expressions, the relation between capital, imperialism and racism is sometimes assumed rather than theorized. This year’s Institute will explore whether and how Marxism can provide the necessary analytical framework to consider the dynamics of racism and imperialism under capital with the historical and theoretical specificity that those social forms demand.
Submit proposals for individual papers, panels, roundtables, or reading groups to mlgics2024@gmail.com by March 1, 2024.
One of the defining characteristics of MLG Institutes are reading groups, where shared texts are circulated in advance, and one or more participants facilitate a seminar-style discussion of the readings with Institute participants. These consistently lead to provocative, sustained, common points of engagement throughout the Institute (and between Institutes over time). We invite reading group proposals on Marxist analyses of imperialism, racism, and their relation to capital. Seminal texts from the Marxist tradition are welcome, as are contemporary critical engagements. Reading groups should focus on a single text of no more than 50 pages, or one longer text broken up over multiple reading groups. We would like to have at least one (but happily two) reading groups per day.
Suggested themes include (but are not limited to):
Marxist analysis of ongoing imperial war on Palestine
Imperialism and capitalist stagnation
Islamophobia and the war on terror
The (neo/post)colonial in/as capital
Indigenous insurgency against settlement and occupation
Learning for today from Bandung era Marxisms, Third World era Marxisms, post-Western Marxisms, Indigenous Marxisms, anti-colonial Marxisms
Land back, reparations, wages for housework, and the demands that break through the immediacy of the demand
Racial capitalism
Racial fascisms
Black and Indigenous futurities
Abolition movements and abolition critique
The synergies of exploitation, expropriation and subalternization
World-systems theory and historical capitalism
Revisiting Dependency theory and new theories of ‘uneven development’
Black radicalism/Black communism, then and now
Insurgent poetics
Communist aesthetics
Postcolonial diasporic life under capitalism
Social forms, politicized identities, and/as strategies of accumulation
Class struggle and/as identity politics
Theorizing (no-)state solutions
Accommodations:
The Grey Nuns Residence (Concordia dorms) are now taking room reservations for the summer. Reservations are made by you, directly with the residence. The Grey Nuns do not reserve a block of rooms for the ICS; reservations are first come, first served. However, the residence has given ICS participants a discount code to use when you book online:
Link to the Grey Nuns dorm reservations: https://www.concordia.ca/summerstays
Coupon Code: ICS24
Instructions for booking your dorm room:
Visit our accommodation website to easily reserve online: https://www.concordia.ca/summerstays
To benefit from a 10% discount, use the following COUPON code: ICS24
To see the maximum number of room-types available change the default setting from 2 to 1 adult.
The discount is valid from June 10 to June 16, 2024.
Schedule Schedule-graph Reading Groups/material Meeting Location Merch BBQ
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