Blog

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 by Rohini Hensman                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Preface

Jairus Banaji

At Historical Materialism, we are devastated by the loss to our movement of Neil Davidson, who was a source of unflinching support to the journal, book series and conferences. We will be publishing two books by him in the book series, and we strongly encourage you to purchase his works that are available from Haymarket Books https://www.haymarketbooks.org/authors/86-neil-davidson and from Pluto Press https://www.plutobooks.com/author/neil-davidson/

* The editorial board of Historical Materialism recognises that the ongoing pandemic has rendered all planning uncertain. It is by no means guaranteed that universities in the UK and elsewhere will be open as usual in the Autumn term, nor can we calculate the personal, financial and material toll of the current public health emergency on comrades’ ability to participate in the conference. We recognise, however, that the conference has become an important point of reference, and a kind of community, for many of us, and hope to be able to hold it in some form. We thus remain flexible in terms of the dates and modality of the conference (for instance, enabling more distanced participation than in the past) and will continuously review the situation and communicate with the HM community.

Roger Martelli

Panagiotis Sotiris

The Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at the University of Nottingham has organised a one-day workshop Revisiting the ‘Mode of Production’: Enduring Controversies over Labour, Exploitation and Historiographies of Capitalism on the 1^st July 2019. The event was dedicated to the re-examination of two important debates in historical materialism related to the conceptualisation of the mode of production and domestic labour that were thriving in the 1970s and attracted fresh interest more recently. We were delighted to host two distinguished contributors, Jairus Banaji and Silvia Federici as keynote speakers who presented alongside other prominent authors, including Andreas Bieler, Tony Burns, Neil Davidson, Jens Lerche, Alessandra Mezzadri and Benno Teschke. In this blog post, Jokubas Salyga and Kayhan Valadbaygi, the organisers of the workshop, share video-recorded proceedings of the event.

Pepijn Brandon

We are extremely sad to be sharing the news that Kevin Floyd, a path-breaking theorist of queer Marxism and Professor at Kent State University, has died. Kevin was the author of The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) as well as a large number of articles and chapters that together laid the ground for a new theoretical foundation for queer Marxism.  He presented atHistorical Materialism conferences in London, New York and Toronto and published in the journal. His favourite intellectual milieu was the Marxist Literary Group, where he played a leadership role and published in its journalMediations.