CFP: HM Australasia 2012

http://historicalmaterialism2012.wordpress.com/

Historical Materialism Australasia 2012—Call For Papers
Following the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”
thesis epitomized the prevailing attitude, summed up more brutally by
Margaret Thatcher’s injunction that “There is No Alternative.” Twenty
years on from Fukuyama’s assertion, liberal triumphalism has been
battered by war, recession and political radicalization on the left
and the right. In this context even Fukuyama has conceded that history
does indeed have a future.

Karl Marx famously remarked that we make our own history, adding that
we do not do so “under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”.
Today, history is being re-made on the streets of the Middle East and
North Africa, and now also across the Global North. These struggles
will shape the world’s future. Yet they take place in conditions
marked by protracted economic crisis, continuing wars and imperialist
“interventions”, and the rule of the market over all of life. The
reoccupation of the world’s streets, squares and commons is matched by
the ever-increasing subordination of parliaments to the dictates of
the market, witnessed most profoundly in the imposition of
technocratic rule in Greece, Italy and elsewhere.

These events have seen Marx return to mainstream debate, but all too
often in the form of having his insights cherry picked and reified in
an attempt to rescue capitalism from itself. There is a need to go
beyond such appropriation, to reestablish a living critique of
political economy, to work towards the “determinate negation” of
capitalism that Marx spoke of. Such a project requires raising
questions about the meaning, the form and the very desirability of
democracy in an era of growing technocratic rule. Similarly, as human
rights provide a moral cover for wars it becomes necessary to
interrogate the language of rights in contemporary political
struggles. And, as revolution re-appears on the global stage, if in
new forms hardly recognizable to revolutionaries of the past, it is
clear that the categories of our political thought and practice must
be subjected to renewed thought and debate.

Historical Materialism Australasia is a one-day conference to be held
in Central Sydney on Saturday 21 July 2012.

To facilitate this, Historical Materialism welcomes individual paper
submissions and panel proposals that seek to contribute to this debate.

Please email paper abstracts of no more than 250 words and panel
proposals of no more than 100 words to historicalmaterialism2012@gmail.com
 by Friday, April 13th.

—Jessica Whyte, Rory Dufficy & Tad Tietze (organising group)