About Us
Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory is a Marxist journal, appearing four times a year, based in London. Founded in 1997, it asserts that, notwithstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. In our selection of materials, we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. Marx demanded the ‘merciless criticism of everything that exists’: for us that includes Marxism itself. Details for submitting articles to the journal can be found here.
Since 1997, the Editorial Board has extended its activities beyond the production of the journal. We contribute to producing the Historical Materialism Book Series published first in hardback by Brill followed by a paperback edition published by Haymarket. We organise the annual HM London conference in mid-November, now in its 22nd year. Affiliated networks are organising conferences in Ankara, Barcelona, New York, Montreal, Sydney, Athens, Cluj with past conferences in Beirut, Rome and Delhi.
The main role of the website is to advertise the journal and its related activities. We therefore post News items, new blogs and relevant blogs from affiliated websites that relate to the journal, book series or conferences, as well as more general Book reviews, Reading Guides, Interviews, and Figures. We also publish archive Articles and book reviews. If you want to contribute to one of these categories, by writing on historical and contemporary issues of interest to Marxists and critical authors and activists, please contact the website editor on website@historicalmaterialism.org. We accept pieces no longer than 10,000 words.
To contact the Editorial Board:
The Editors of Historical Materialism
Faculty of Law and Social Sciences
SOAS, University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
United Kingdom
For publicising relevant news, events or call for papers, please email announcements@historicalmaterialism.org.
For other general enquiries, please email info@historicalmaterialism.org.
For website enquiries relating to content, please email website@historicalmaterialism.org.
You can also follow us on our Twitter, Facebook group, and Facebook page.
Marxism is nothing if not ‘interdisciplinary’, or, put differently, a theory of totality. The relations of production are dominant relations that exert influence across the whole social matrix. It makes no sense to plug away in one small area of the curriculum without exposing insights to other researchers, in order to probe further their meaningfulness and value.
The task of the Marxist critic is to offer a self-reflexive account of historical differentiations between areas of knowledge, without naturalising them or reifying their separation. To this end, the journal opposes the compartmentalisation of knowledge. Given the pressures of careers and the institutionalisation of researchers, this is no easy task. Historical Materialism welcomes contributions that cut across disciplines and evade academic jargon.
Historical Materialism has published enough grey-beards in the past and will continue to do so. We are, however, optimistic that our diagnosis of real-existing world conditions, with the recurrent upsurge of class antagonisms and the continual exertions of imperial violence, produce ever new Marxist constituencies. Their hither-to unheard voices are welcome in our journal. Furthermore, Historical Materialism, as proper to a Marxist forum, cultivates international contacts, giving room to analysts from across the world, including non-Anglophone countries. We attempt to host a worldwide scrutiny as our contribution to a denunciation of capitalism worldwide.
Editorial Board
Josep Maria Antentas is a sociologist currently working at the Facultat d’Educació Social i Treball Social Pere Tarrés, Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona. He has researched and published on labour, social movements, internationalism and political strategy.
Svenja Bromberg is a Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research and teaching focus on issues of emancipation, radical democracy, citizenship and human rights between the 18th and 21st century as well as on different conceptions of (historical, dialectical, new) materialism. She completed her PhD “Thinking ‘Emancipation’ after Marx – A Conceptual Analysis of Emancipation between Citizenship and Revolution in Marx and Balibar” in 2016 at Goldsmiths funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and the German Academic Exchange Service. Svenja is a co-editor of Eurotrash (published 2016 at Merve Verlag, Berlin) and a member on the editorial board of the publisher August Verlag Berlin.
Sebastian Budgen works as senior editor for Verso Books. He lives in Paris and works particularly on transformations of French political and intellectual life.
Ankica Čakardić holds the Chair of Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Gender at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She is the author of The Rebellious Mind: Essays in Radical Social Philosophy (2021), Like a Clap of Thunder. Three Essays on Rosa Luxemburg (2019) and Spectres of Transition. Social History of Capitalism (2019). As well as her association with Historical Materialism, she is a member of the editorial board of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso) and Transform: A European Review of Politics (transform! europe). Her research interests and publications lie in the areas of Marxist philosophy and radical social theory, including Marxist-feminism, Rosa Luxemburg and the history of women’s struggles in Yugoslavia. She is currently working on two research projects: firstly, her new book Yugoslav Praxis School: Red Philosophy, Feminism and Revolution and secondly, Volume 6 of The Complete works of Rosa Luxemburg: Debates on Revolutionary Strategy and Organisation (1892-1903).
Demet Şahende Dinler is Helena Normanton Research Fellow in International Development at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. She holds undergraduate degrees in Political Science and Sociology from the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey and completed her MSc and PhD degrees in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her PhD was a multi-sited analysis of the recycling market including waste pickers, scrap traders in Turkey and the London Metal Exchange. She is currently working on an ethnographic research project entitled “Governing Nature and Market: Farmers, Traders and Experts in the Cut Flower Industry” which traces the varieties of production and exchange relations in the cut flower market from farms/greenhouses to local/global auctions. Apart from her academic research, Demet worked as the UPS workers’ organising campaign coordinator for the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and has been an experienced trainer and organiser for informal workers’ associations/unions including waste pickers, construction workers and domestic workers in Turkey. Her articles on labour and class struggle have been published in Third World Quarterly and Class Strikes Back (Azzellini and Kraft (eds.), 2018, Brill). She is also a member of the Turkish Collective/Magazine 1+1 Express.
Sai Englert is a lecturer at Leiden University. He works on the Political Economy, Labour Movements, Zionism, anti-Semitism and Settler Colonialism.
Juan Grigera is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow based at University College London Institute of Americas. He completed a PhD from the University of Buenos Aires with support from CONICET (Argentina), after being awarded an MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics. His work on the Argentine 2001 crisis, ECLAC, deindustrialization and class formation has been published in several journals and he has recently edited Argentina despues de la convertibilidad (2002-2011). He is an active member of the editorial board of Cuadernos de Economía Crítica (Argentina) in addition to Historical Materialism. His latest research project is entitled Bringing the global market back in. Industrialising and exporting commodities: Argentina and Brazil (1950-2010) and proposes an in-depth comparative study of the long-term economic performance of Brazil and Argentina after 1950s. This research concerns both the comparative assessment of the economic dynamics of two key countries of Latin America and the theoretical modes in which they have been approached.
Louis Hartnoll studied aesthetics, art theory, philosophy, and visual cultures at the University of the Arts London, Goldsmiths, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London (CRMEP). Supported by the Leverhulme Trust, he is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the History of Art Department at the University of Amsterdam.
Katharina Hunfeld is a political theorist currently working as Associate Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her main research interests include the politics of time and temporality, Marxist Ecology, and the entanglement of emancipatory struggles.
Alex de Jong is co-director of the International Institute for Research and Education, based in Amsterdam. His research interests include communist movements in South-East Asia, as well as historical and contemporary far-right movements and ideologies. He co-edited October 1917 – Workers in Power (2017, IIRE & Merlin Press) and edited a collection of essays by Enzo Traverso: Critique of Modern Barbarism. Essays on fascism, anti-Semitism and the use of history (2019, IIRE). He is a member of the socialist group Grenzeloos in the Netherlands.
Kaan Kangal is full professor at the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University. He is primarily interested in Marx-Engels research, history of MEGA1 and MEGA2, Young Hegelianism, classical German philosophy, and German Marxism in the 19th and 20th centuries. His work on Marx’s Bonn Notebooks won the 2019 David Riazanov Prize. His most recent book is Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He is currently working on late Marx’s notebooks on agriculture, ecology, natural sciences and communal property.
Robert Knox is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool. His primary interest lies in the fields of Marxist and critical legal theory, especially as regards international law. More specifically, his research attempts to analyse the close interconnection between capitalism, imperialism, processes of racialisation and international law. His work has also attempted to examine the role that law plays in promoting and inhibiting radical social change, focusing particularly on the way in which law is able to reshape collective political subjectivity. He is currently working Against International Law (Verso) co-authored with China Miéville. Some of his publications can be found here.
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde (Verso, 2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion 2005), Walter Benjamin: Critical Lives (Reaktion, 2007) and Liquid Crystals: The Art and Science of a Fluid Form (Reaktion, 2016). As well as her association with Historical Materialism, she is in the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy and an editor of Revolutionary History. Her research interests are in Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Other research interests include European literary and visual modernism, the ‘everyday’ and value, memory and history, madness and expression and digital aesthetics. Together with Ben Watson she runs the website www.militantesthetix.co.uk.
Andreas Malm is an associate senior lecturer in human ecology at Lund University. He is the author, most recently, of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016), The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (Verso, 2017), and How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight a World on Fire (Verso, 2021). His primary research interest is the role of fossil fuels in the history of capitalist development, but he also writes on other aspects of climate change and currently works on a book about the politics of wilderness.
Roberto Mozzachiodi is a casualised academic, a workplace organiser and a translator. He is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths College and a Visiting Lecturer at Regent’s University. He writes on Francophone Marxist histories and philosophy and labour struggles in the education sector.
Maïa Pal is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. She defended her PhD in International Relations at the University of Sussex in 2013 on ‘The Politics of Extraterritoriality: a historical sociology of public international law’. Her research interests are early modern European and colonial history, law and state formation, global governance and free trade agreements, extraterritorial jurisdiction, and contemporary student movements in relation to counter-conduct and critical pedagogy. She has published in Global Society and in International Studies Perspectives. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Jurisdictional Accumulation: an Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital(forthcoming, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), and on a co-edited volume The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (2019, Abingdon: Routledge). She is also a member of the Political Marxism research group at the University of Sussex.
Darren Roso is a communist philosopher based in the Melbourne scene of continental philosophy. He is principally interested in French and German Marxist theory, the history of materialism, German philosophy (Kant and Hegel) and the critique of politics. His current book project is focused on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, Althusser and post-structuralist thought, in an effort to think the contributions that the Frankfurt School and the French moment of Marxism and philosophy made to thinking about the materiality of materialism. He is the author of Daniel Bensaïd: From the Actuality of the Revolution to the Melancholic Wager (Brill 2023) and a forthcoming monograph Karl Korsch: Weimar Germany’s Marxist Heretic (Brill).
Panagiotis Sotiris has a PhD from Panteion University Athens. He currently works as a journalist and editor in Athens, Greece. He has taught social and political philosophy at various Greek Universities. His research interests include Marxist philosophy, the theory of imperialism and left strategy. His most recent book is A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser (Brill 2020 / Haymarket 2021).
Alexander Stoffel is a Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE). His main research interests include gender and sexuality studies, theories of International Relations, global historical sociology, and histories of Left struggle. Stoffel completed his PhD, ‘Queer Worldmaking: Radical Sexual Politics in the Age of United States Hegemony’, at Queen Mary University funded by the Leverhulme Trust. He is a former editorial board member at Millennium: Journal of International Studies.
Peter Thomas is Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at Brunel University, London. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Brill, 2009; Haymarket, 2011), and (with Juha Koivisto) Mapping Communication and Media Research: Conjunctures, Institutions, Challenges (Tampere University Press, 2010) and co-editor (with Riccardo Bellofiore and Guido Starosta) of In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse (Brill, 2012). He has published widely on Marxist political theory and philosophy, the history of political thought and the history of philosophy. He is the translator of Antonio Negri, Goodbye Mr Socialism, (Seven Stories Press, 2008), (with Alberto Toscano) Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek’s, Philosophy in the Present (Polity, 2009), Mario Tronti’s Workers and Capital(Mayfly, 2012) and (with Sara R. Farris) Mario Tronti’s The Autonomy of the Political(forthcoming, 2012). He is currently working on three research projects: first, a critical history of contemporary Western European Marxisms, from 1945 to the present; second, a study of recent debates about the notion of the Political; and third, a critical reconstruction of the history of the concept of conjuncture in modern political thought and the social sciences.
Cat Moir Wolfe is Honorary Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Sydney, and she is currently training to become a psychoanalytically oriented clinical psychologist at the University of Toulouse. Her research interests are in critical theory, psychoanalytic Marxism, and radical psychology. Her book, Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism: Ontology, Epistemology, Politics (Brill, 2020), was shortlisted for the Deutscher Prize in 2020. She is the co-editor with Henk de Berg of Rethinking Ernst Bloch (Brill, 2023), and her articles have appeared in Historical Materialism, Revue internationale de la philosophie, and Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, among other venues. She is also a member of communist mental health collective The Red Clinic, and the not-for-profit organisation Psychologues du Monde. Her current psychology practice centres on questions of gender, sexuality, and exile.
Jamie Woodcock is a senior lecturer at the University of Essex and a researcher based in London. He is the author of books including Troublemaking (Verso, 2023), The Fight Against Platform Capitalism (University of Westminster Press, 2021), The Gig Economy (Polity, 2019), Marx at the Arcade (Haymarket, 2019), and Working the Phones (Pluto, 2017). His research is inspired by workers’ inquiry and focuses on labour, work, the gig economy, platforms, resistance, organising, and videogames. He is also on the editorial board of Notes from Below.
Corresponding Editorial Board
Alex Anievas, Samantha Ashman, Liam Campling, Giorgio Cesarale, Gail Day, Dae-oup Chang, Angela Dimitrakaki, Steve Edwards, Adam Fabry, Janaína de Faria, Sara Farris, Harrison Fluss, James Furner, Giorgos Galanis, Owen Hatherley, Paul Heideman, Jim Kincaid, Gal Kirn, Ashok Kumar, Alex Levant, Grant Mandarino, Geoff Mann, Thomas Marois, Søren Mau, China Miéville, Benjamin Noys, Chris O’Kane, Edemilson Paraná, Nicole Pepperell, Gonzalo Pozo-Martin, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Guido Starosta, Sara Salem, Richard Seymour, Greg Sharzer, Lukas Slothuus, Alberto Toscano, Mike Wayne, Lea Ypi.