Capitalism has been able to attenuate but not resolve the contradictions of capital, doing so by occupying and producing space, extending urbanism, programming consumption, expanding the frontiers of primitive accumulation, and sustaining the reproduction of the relations of production. This is not an inexorable process; nor are its participant-witnesses ignorant of the continued constitution and presence of spaces of non-capitalism. Yet within considerations of the survival of capitalism there has been less focus granted towards the social reproduction of the relations of production comprising gendered, racialised, ecological, decolonial and class hierarchies. It was Henri Lefebvre in The Survival of Capitalism who indicated that the theory of reproduction brings out the imperative for critical analysis to consider the false “new” within capitalism. ‘The false new gets christened neo-something or other’, he stated. But under neoliberalism what is the relation between the fragmentation of space and the capacity of the relations of production to produce space on a planetary scale? How does the jigsaw puzzle of the rural and the urban come together in processes of “development” forming the survival of capitalism? Where are the spaces of social reproduction embedded in the materialisation of the relations of production and their ongoing arrangement? On which terrains of confrontation are the social reproduction of the relations of production that decentre and contest the survival of capitalism located? How do cultural relations participate in, or potentially resist, processes of social reproduction? How does culture in the broad sense of the term constitute a field in which the dynamic tension between representation and material (re-)production plays out?
The organisers of Historical Materialism Sydney 2018 invite proposals for panels and individual papers dealing with these themes or any other topics that engage with historical materialist thought from critical sociology and geography; heterodox economics and the critique of political economy; cultural, literary and aesthetic theory; political science and theory; history and historiography; philosophy; law; science studies and any other relevant discipline.
Abstracts should be no more than 250 words in length and should be sent to hmaustralasia@gmail.com by September 30, 2018.
All conference information including registration, venue and program details will be available at www.hmsydney.net as it becomes available.
A hi-resolution version of the poster suitable for printing can be accessed by clicking on the thumbnail below