News | Southeastern Europe Rethinking Crisis, Resistance, and Strategy

The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung at Historical Materialism Athens 2019

Titled Rethinking Crisis, Resistance and Strategy, the international interdisciplinary conference Historical Materialism Athens will take place at Panteion University from Thursday, 2 May to Sunday, 5 May 2019, organized in cooperation with the Department of Social Policy at Panteion and co-sponsored by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung’s Athens Office. The language of the conference is English.

Over the course of four days more than 120 conference panels will host over 400 presenters from more than 30 countries including Northern and Western Europe, the Balkans, North and South America, the Middle East, India, and Pakistan.

The conference aims to contribute to the ongoing resurgence of Marxist theory and the revolutionary prospect, in the conviction that systematic research and open dialogue can lead to the overcoming of the dead ends of dogmatism and empiricism. Two centuries after the birth of Karl Marx and as currents of insurgent thought proliferate, Marxism remains the starting point for the rebuilding of transformative left politics. In the past few years, Greece found itself at the intersection of processes defined by the intensity of the country’s financial/debt crisis, the destabilization of hegemonic institutions, the ensuing retreat of social movements, but also continuous resistance against the status quo—all of which have been salient references in a national and transnational dialogue.

The conference covers a range of themes including (but not limited to) capitalism in the 21st century, questions in philosophy, economic and social theory, refugees and migrants, feminism, queer Marxism and social reproduction, the environment, the common and the commons in theory and practice, education and the university, technology, work and labour, emergent social movements, anti-fascism, and the relationship of art and literature to the critique of capitalism.

The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung is sponsoring a number of panels at the conference, including:

Thursday, 2 May

12:45–14:30: Questions of Strategy in the Historical Revolutionary Movement

Arturo Zoffman Rodriguez, "The shadow of October in the heat of July: The memory of the Russian Revolution in the anarchist ‘debate on power’, Spain 1936"

Evangelos Karatzis, "From the combat party to the art of insurrection: The Bolshevik strategy re-examined"

Florian Wilde, "Revolution as Reapolitik: Ernst Meyer and the origins of the united front strategy of the KPD"

Chair: Alexandros Minotakis

17:00–18:45: Political Crisis in Europe

Thibault Biscahie, "Ideological crisis, radical centre and the European elections in France"

Loren Balhorn, "Berlin is not (yet) Weimar: the federal republic in protracted decline"

Ioannis Gerasimos, "Subaltern counterpublics: In quest of the fading coordinates of democracy"

Chair: Dionisios Tzarellas

Saturday, 4 May

12:00–14:00: Political Crisis and Left Strategy

Ines Schwerdtner, "Contradictory left strategies in Europe’s core"

Josep Maria Antentas, "Integral strategy, party and the dialectics of dual power and counter-power"

Panagiotis Sotiris, "The strategic question revisited"

Catarina Principe, "To leave or not to leave? The European Union and the role of nation states"

Chair: TBA

14:45–16:30: Labour Exploitation and Subcontracting: Case Studies from the Balkans

Bojana Tamindzija, "Working conditions in the textile industry in Serbia as a paradigm of the position of workers on the periphery of capitalism"

Georgi Medarov, "Garments subcontracting in Bulgaria: the limits of sectoral agreements"

Bora Mema, "Challenges of trade unionism in the garments sector in Albania"

Kristina Ampeva, "Garments working conditions in Macedonia: a view from Shtip"

Chair: Jana Tsoneva

Sunday, 5 May  

12:30–14:30: Social Reproduction and Marxist Feminism for the 21st Century

Ankica Čakardić, "Early social reproduction theory and its contemporary strands"

Angela Dimitrakaki, "The technological imaginary, social reproduction, and feminism for the 99%"

Holly Lewis, "A Marxist feminist approach to queer struggle"

Lynne Segal, "Building resistance to capitalism’s comprehensive crises of care"

Chair: Depoina Paraskeva-Veloudogianni

View the full conference programme here. We will also be present with a literature table and look forward to seeing many friends and colleagues from around Europe!