Seminar in Contemporary Marxist Theory
A speaker series organised by King’s College London (Departments of European and International Studies, Geography and French; School of Management & Business), Queen Mary University of London (Law), and Loughborough University London (Institute for International Management). All seminars are open to the public. No registration is required.
To join the email list for future events, please email seminarmarxisttheory@gmail.com.
Scheduled Talks
Insurgent Empire — In conversation with Priyamvada Gopal
Weds 16 October 2019
5pm
Bush House (NE) -1.01
King’s College London
30 Aldwych
London WC2B 4BG
Insurgent Empire (Verso, 2019) shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom.
Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire.
Much has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.
Watch more at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4362-insurgent-empire-anticolonial-resistance-and-british-dissent-priyamvada-gopal
Dr Priyamvada Gopal is Reader in Anglophone and Related Literature at the University of Cambridge.
For further information, please contact: lucia.pradella@kcl.ac.uk
Frank García Hernández (Cuban Institute of Cultural Research)
A brief critical history of Trotskyism in Cuba
Thurs 24 October 2019
5pm
Norfolk Building Room 342N
King’s College London
Surrey St, WC2R 2NS
The Seminar in Contemporary Marxist Theory is happy to welcome Frank García Hernández, a Cuban historian and sociologist, researcher at the Cuban Institute of Cultural Research Juan Marinello. Frank, who coordinated the international conference on Leon Trotsky held in Havana in May 2019, will discuss the complex history of Trotskyism in Cuba. Several researchers have investigated this history, but this has always been done from biased political positions, thus losing the necessary academic objectivity. As if that were not enough, serious historiographic mistakes have been made that new specialists reproduce uncritically. Frank will present an updated approach, which seeks to overcome these shortcomings.
For further information, please contact: alex.callinicos@kcl.ac.uk.
Kohei Saito (Osaka City University)
Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship Revisited from an Ecological Perspective
Weds 6 November 2019
5pm
Bush House (NE) 0.01
King’s College London
30 Aldwych
London WC2B 4BG
The intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels has been a big issue in the history of Marxism, especially after Lukacs's provocative claim that Engels made a fatal mistake by extending the dialectic to the sphere of nature. Western Marxism today falls into a difficult situation under today's ecological crisis because it has completely expelled the analysis of nature. Furthermore, the publication of Marx's notebooks through the MEGA also shows that he was eagerly studying the natural sciences in his late years. However, this does not mean that Marx and Engels studied natural science for the same reasons. By examining Marx's and Engels's notebooks, their difference will be revealed in terms of ecological critique of capitalism.
Dr Kohei Saito teaches at Osaka City University in Japan. He is the author of Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2017), which was awarded the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize in 2018.
For further information, please contact: alex.callinicos@kcl.ac.uk.
Siggie Vertommen (Cambridge)
"Global Fertility Chains": a feminist political economy of transnational surrogacy between Israel/Palestine and Georgia
Weds 4 December 2019
5pm
Norfolk Building G.01
King’s College London
Surrey St, WC2R 2NS
Since the late 1990s gestational surrogacy has transformed from a small-scale and local reproductive practice into a flourishing multi-billion-dollar transnational industry, involving various actors such as fertility clinics, surrogacy agencies, lawyers, medical couriers and a growing number of women from across the world who are taking up work as egg cell providers and surrogate carriers. While single country-based sociological and anthropological research on commercial surrogacy in India, Mexico, Israel, Russia and the United States has offered tremendous insights over the past two decades, what is still lacking is a coherent conceptual framework to better understand the global and highly gendered and racialised processes of capital accumulation and labour exploitation in which transnational surrogacy is embedded.
Building further on the literature on global commodity/care chains and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on "global fertility chains" between Israel/Palestine and Georgia, this presentation proposes a feminist political economy approach to transnational surrogacy that takes into account 1) the unevenly developed character of global fertility chains, 2) their highly technological nature 3) the constitutive role of the state in creating the demand, organising the supply and accommodating the creation of surplus value and most importantly 3) their reliance on women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labour.
Dr Siggie Vertommen works as a research associate at the Sociology of Reproduction Research Group (ReproSoc) of the University of Cambridge.
For further information, please contact: lucia.pradella@kcl.ac.uk.
Past Speakers
Matt Vidal (Loughborough University London), Tomás Rotta (University of Greenwich), and Carolina Alves (University of Cambridge)
Book launch: The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx
22 May 2019
Dariush Doust (Shanxi University)
On Unconditional Submission in Kant’s Political Writings
8 May 2019
Nisha Kapoor (University of Warwick)
The Citizen Surveillant: Race, securitisation and the co-option of citizenship
1 May 2019
Talat Ahmed (Edinburgh University)
Gandhi @150: Rethinking India’s non-violent revolutionary
13 March 2019
Virginia Fontes (Universidade Federal Fluminense) and Alfredo Saad-Filho (SOAS)
From Lula to Bolsonaro: Debating the rise of the far right in Brazil
6 February 2019
Michael Roberts (independent economist), Maria Ivanova (Goldsmiths), and Juan Pableo Mateo (University of Valladolid)
Book Launch: World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx's Law of Profitability
13 February 2019
Matthias Lievens (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Jean-Paul Sartre on masses, classes and their struggles
5 December 2018
Lee Wengraf (Activist and writer)
Extracting Profit: Neoliberalism, Imperialism and the New Scramble for Africa
Book launch with discussant: Elisa Greco (University of Leeds)
21 November 2018
William Clare Roberts (McGill)
Marx’s politics of freedom
8 November 2018
Majed Akhter (King's College London)
Geopolitics of the Belt and Road: Space, State, and Capital in China and Pakistan
17 October 2018
Dr Tomas Rotta (University of Greenwich)
Unproductive accumulation in the USA: Knowledge, exploitation and income Inequality
21 March 2018
Dr Alexander Loftus (King’s College London)
Gramsci as a historical geographical materialist
9 May 2018
Dr Julia Nicholls (King’s College London)
Marx's Capital and the origins of Marxism in modern France
14 February 2018
Professor Bill Bowring (Birkbeck)
Marx, the State, and Spinoza: Against Hobbes and Schmitt
17 November 2018
Dr Anne Alexander (University of Cambridge)
Marxist approaches to understanding Islam and Islamism: a critical reappraisal
29 November 2017
Professor Claude Serfati (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin)
Le militaire: une histoire française (book launch)
Discussants: Prof Alex Callinicos (King’s College London) and Dr Eva Nanopoulos (Queen Mary)
18 October 2017
Professor Leo Panitch (York University)
Trumping the American Empire?
8 November 2017
Dr Rutvica Andrjiasevic
Foxconn beyond China: Capital-labour relations as co-determinants of global organisation of production
9 May 2017
Professor Lea Ypi (LSE)
Legitimacy, Dictatorship and Utopia: A Marxist Perspective on Political Obligation
22 March 2017
Professor Alan Cafruny (Hamilton College, USA) and Professor Magnus Ryner (King's College London);
The European Union and Global Capitalism (book launch)
Discussants: Professor Jane Hardy (Hertfordshire) & Professor Engelbert Stockhammer (Kingston)
15 March 2017
Dr Tony Norfield
Finance and the Imperialist World Economy
8 February 2017
Dr Claes Belfrage (University of Liverpool)
Financialisation and the Crisis-tendencies in the New Swedish Model
30 November 2016
Dr Ana Dinerstein (University of Bath)
Discussing Utopia in 21st Century Capitalism
29 November 2016
Professor Stefan Kipfer (York University)
Which Decolonial Gramsci? A Case for the Fanon-Gramsci Lineage
9 November 2016
Ian Angus (Editor of Climate & Capitalism)
Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System
19 October 2016
Professor Erik Olin Wright (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
How to be an anti-capitalist for the 21st century
6 October, 2016
Dr Paolo Gerbaudo (King’s College London)
‘Anarcho-populism: on the ideology of the movement of the squares of 2011’
17 February 2016
Dr Yuliya Yurchenko (University of Greenwich)
‘Social forces in the making of contemporary Ukraine: capitalist rivalries and the dispossessed’
20 January 2016
Professor Riccardo Bellofiore &Professor Alex Callinicos
A Dialogue on Alex Callinicos’s book Deciphering Capital: Marx’s Capital and Its Destiny
9 November 2015
Dr Stathis Kouvelakis
Lessons of the Greek Crisis
21 October 2015
Dr Nicholas De Genova
Theorising the ‘Crisis' of the European Border Regime
25 November 2015
Dr Matt Vidal (King's College London)
Postfordism: the geriatric stage of Atlantic capitalism
18 February 2015
Dr Lucia Pradella (University of Venice Ca' Foscari and SOAS)
Globalization and the critique of political economy: new insights from Marx’s writings
18 March 2015
Professor Bob Jessop (Lancaster University)
Re-reading Poulantzas in and for the current crisis
21 January 2015
Seminar Organisers
Alex Callinicos (King’s College London)
Stathis Kouvelakis (King’s College London)
Alex Loftus (King’s College London)
Eva Nanopoulos (Queen Mary University of London)
Lucia Pradella (King’s College London)
Matt Vidal (Loughborough University London)
Links
Videos of the "Capital.150: Marx’s 'Capital' Today" conference, featuring David Harvey, Michael Roberts, Guglielmo Carchedi, Paul Mattick Jr, Ben Fine, Tony Norfield, Alex Callinicos, Fred Moseley and Beverly Silver.