Progressive Geographies

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The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: States, Strategies, Socialisms

Twelfth Annual Historical Materialism Conference, School of Oriental and African Studies, Central London, 5-8 November 2015

As austerity tightens its grip around the throats of the peoples of Europe, but also rears its ugly head in Brazil and elsewhere, we are forced to recognize that it is not the mere byproduct of the « economic crisis » but a political project in its own right, one whose aim is to deepen and consolidate the most uncompromising forms of neoliberal capitalism. It cannot be said that this project has hitherto been met with passivity, even if social movements of resistance have been mostly far from strong enough to halt its advance. Yet something is perhaps beginning to change, namely the emergence of counter-austerity projects that have pitched themselves at a political – even electoral or governmental – level. With all their weaknesses, hesitations and contradictions, the chinks of light in Southern Europe, amongst others, should compel Marxists to pose a whole series of ‘old’ strategic and theoretical problems in new garbs and new configurations, but perhaps also to retire some of our dear fetishes and shibboleths, and to experiment with forms and strategies adequate to our present. Among the themes that have returned to the agenda are: the relationship of movements and parties of the radical Left to states and governments; the need for a political response to how class power is enmeshed with forms of domination that have gender, race, imperialism or sexuality as their axes; possible « socialist » futures and the « transitional » mediations implied by them; the guiding dichotomies of left thought: reform and revolution, revolution and revolt, state and movement, parties classes and masses; the link between the limits to capital and the limits of politics.
Over a hundred panels on a wide variety of topics and plenary sessions on: Race, Mobility and the State; Austerity and Socialist Strategy in Southern Europe; Social Reproduction Theory; Marxism and Religion; Workers’ Struggles in South Africa.

Provisional Programme; Conference poster for download