Events

We now live in a world of genocide and disaster. That we are witnessing the Israeli war machine destroying Gaza and attacking Lebanon while the Earth is crossing one ‘climate-change’ threshold after another suggests that catastrophe is becoming the ‘new normal’ of contemporary capitalism.

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Since the mid-2010s, East and Southeast Asia have witnessed an unending chain of uneven uprisings against interlocking oppressive processes of racial capitalist accumulation. This new conjuncture has emerged during an interregnum of multipolar competition for global military domination and financial hegemony. It is characterized by counter-revolutions of the global right and authoritarian regimes with muscular ethnocentric aspirations for settler and imperial consolidation. The mobilization of US military allies in the Asia-Pacific to suppress support for Palestinian liberation, the Chinese extraction of frontier resources through infrastructural development, and Russia’s imperial rhetoric in its invasion of Ukraine demonstrate such ongoing geopolitical competition. Other Asian states, even those not situated at the extreme end of the rightwing and authoritarian spectrum, likewise participate as sub-empires in the process of global capital accumulation—violently subsuming in the process their peripheral regions and ethnic minorities for resources and labor. This sub-imperial dynamic is evident in the relationships between Japan and Okinawa, Indonesia and West Papua, Taiwan and the country’s indigenous people, and Myanmar and the Rohingya.

On behalf of the Editorial Board of Historical Materialism, a warm welcome to HM’s conference in Cluj. We applaud the initiative of our Cluj comrades in developing a very strong conference, the first we have held in Eastern Europe, but hopefully not the last. We value all those who take part in our conferences and activities, encourage you to subscribe to the journal and look at our book series, and hope to see you again at one of our conferences, whether London in November or coming soon Athens in April 2025.

Whether the discussion is about reforming pension systems, overhauling health care or the sources of inflation, we are constantly reminded that life has a cost, a price to pay, a burden to bear. At the same time, we are also periodically reminded that not all lives are valued or priced in the same manner; some lives are cheaper and more expendable than others: from over-work and deteriorating living conditions for billions of ‘essential workers’ to police violence and incarceration; from sexual abuse and the denial of bodily autonomy to the socially determined vulnerability and ‘susceptibility’ during the pandemic; from the persistence of racialised exploitation and oppression to the many faces of neocolonialism; from militarised borders turned into kill zones to the ongoing climate disaster.

Draft Programme

Available here

Deadline for abstracts: 15th June 2020