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:

  1. Visit our accommodation website to easily reserve online: https://www.concordia.ca/summerstays

  2. To benefit from a 10% discount, use the following COUPON code: ICS24

  3. To see the maximum number of room-types available change the default setting from 2 to 1 adult.

  4. 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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