Danish Society for Marxist Studies
Furthering the intersection of Marxism and critical scholarship in Denmark
As the 11th conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies draws dangerously and excitingly close, we are happy and proud to share the programme and book of abstracts for the conference (subject of last minute changes).
Find the programme, which also contains practical information about the conference, here (updated 1 October):
Find the book of abstracts here:
The 11th annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist studies is only a few weeks away, and we are happy to announce an exciting extra event at this years conference:
At the end of the first day we will have a special plenary session with the research collective Freedom of Movements.
Freedom of movements is a collective doing activist research in Copenhagen – working with and learning from local movements and struggles. The collective was formed in 2015 as an effort to contribute to the migration struggles that were spreading across Denmark’s asylum and deportation camps in those years. In the last two years they have researched the political repression of the movement for the liberation of Palestine in Denmark.
At the plenary session, representatives from Freedom of Movements will present a talk and lead a discussion of the wider implication for research engaged in contemporary social conflicts on the basis of the work they have carried out to document the represion of Palestine solidarity in Denmark.
We look forward to welcoming Freedom of Movements at the conference and to an engaging and productive exchange at this special plenary event!
The session will take place at 5-6pm on Friday 3 October.
What kind of political thinking about freedom is required to respond to the challenges of our present moment? What forms of knowledge production can support, complement and advance struggles for the liberation of Palestine and against state repression? This and similar questions have animated our work at the Freedom of Movements research collective.
Over the last years, we have worked on documenting the repression of the movement for the liberation of Palestine in Denmark, collecting testimonies of people who have faced political repression at the hands of the police, the media, employers, politicians and state institutions. The pro-Palestine movement is a paradigmatic case in the sense that it reveals the contours of the Danish state’s repressive apparatus: how it criminalizes dissent, how it uses anti-terror laws and anti-antisemitism policies to silence Palestine solidarity, and how it deploys the full weight of institutional power – from the police to the university – to enforce political conformity and pacify the struggle.
In this plenary, we reflect on the meaning of writing collectively while being engaged politically with the struggles and the people we study and document, working with them and alongside them. We challenge the notion that knowledge production is an individual and detached academic exercise that can only happen within ‘academia’. We argue for forms of research that are collective and refuse neutrality, complicity and colonial ‘objectivity’. Research that is politically engaged and explicit (both in theory and in practice) of its commitments; and that take place outside academia, using militant spaces and other activist infrastructure. Knowledge production can and must be mobilized as a weapon in the struggle.
As the 11th annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies, Freedom, approaces, we are proud to announce the second of this year’s two keynotes: Eva von Redecker.
Redecker is a German philosopher, critical theorist, and bestselling non-fiction author based in rural Brandenburg.
Redecker’s work focuses on social praxis, feminism, critique of capitalism, freedom, and authoritarianism. Her most recent work includes books on the new fascism (Dieser Drang nach Härte, S. Fischer Verlage, 2026) and the freedom to stay (Bleibefreiheit, S. Fischer Verlage, 2025), and her books, in which she tracks the genealogy of modern property in contemporary violence, have been translated into 15 languages. The Freedom to Stay (Polity, 2026) proposes to understand freedom in a temporal way – as enjoyment of fulfilled time. Receker’s dissertation, Praxis and Revolution, came out with Columbia University Press in 2021. Her public writing has also appeared in The Guardian, le monde diplomatique and Die ZEIT.
In the academic year 2026/27, Eva holds a guest professorship for philosophy at the Academy for Fine Arts, Hamburg (HfbK). She is currently working on an epic poem about fossil energy.
At the conference, Redecker will present a keynote based on her recent book on the freedom to stay:
As a philosophical effort, critical theory does not just scandalize cruelty and suffering. It investigates how those are systemically produced, and points out how sometimes even our most progressive achievements cover up, or contribute to, injustice and oppression. In On The Jewish Question, Karl Marx famously criticized bourgeois freedom, newly won in the course of the French Revolution, as alienating and atomizing. Fast forwarding into our present, we witness that beyond ongoing capitalist rule, liberal orders facilitate a fascist turn. Around the globe, in the wake of neoliberalism, at the dawn of the Anthropocene, the appeal to “freedom” fuels fascist mobilizations. To understand this effect, we need to renew our critique of liberal freedom. It is not just egotistic, it is in fact possessive and easily breaks up into destructiveness. Emancipation into liberal self-ownership is not enough to extricate liberty from its abusive underside. Only by negating the abstract spaciality of possession can freedom turn social and ecological. I call the ensuing perspective that of a “freedom to stay”: the right of species and people alike to flourish, and the promise of fulfilled and abundant time rather than mere mobility on a dying planet.
With summer hastely closing on us, it’s time to start planning the fall – and why not begin by registering for the top Danish Marxism conference of the year?
Registration is now open for our 11th annual conference, Freedom, which will take place in Copenhagen 2-3 October 2026, including registration for the conference diner (limited availability)!
Click the image to register.
As the 11th annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies, Freedom, approaces, we are proud to announce the first of this year’s two keynotes: Robert Knox.
Rob Knox is a senior lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool and a member of the editorial board for the renowned journal of Marxist theory, Historical Materialism. His research interests lie in critical and Marxist legal theory, focusing on imperialism and its relationship with International law. More recently, his work has focused on Palestine and on Marxist approaches to analysing the EU.
Together with Adam Hanieh and Rafeef Ziadah her recently published the book Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine (Verso, 2025), in which they challene mainstream narratives about Palestine by placing Israeli settler-colonialism within the broader historical arc of imperialism, race, and fossil capitalism in the Middle East.
Together with Christine Schwöbel-Patel, Knox has also edited the anthology Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice (Counterpress, 2024) on international law and aesthetics.
At the conference, Knox will present a keynote talk on Palestinian liberation and international law:
Liberal invocations of freedom have typically been coupled with an expansive conception for the law. Law, and in political rights, are seen as the way to guarantee individuals with the widest degree of freedom from interference. Such a position has, of course, been frequently contested by Marxists – and indeed by Marx himself – who have often noted the bourgeois nature of this freedom.
In the current conjuncture, many have baulked at this analysis. In an increasingly vulgar capitalism, in which the ‘legal order’ is often understood as collapsing, law – especially international law – has appeared to offer a ‘site of struggle’ . Nowhere has this been clearer in the case of Palestine, where international law, especially in its explicit condemnation of genocide, has appeared to at least offer a defensive bulwark against an openly racist Israeli Zionism and US imperialism.
In this paper, I seek to reflect on this, situating (international law) within broader Marxist understandings of the history and nature of capitalism. I argue that international law has articulated a particularly racialised and bourgeois notion of ‘freedom’, which fundamentally conditions its existence as a ‘site of struggle’. In so doing, I explore the role that international law has played in the racialisation of Palestine, as well as its role in facilitating the expansion and consolidation of the Israeli state and its racial projects. It is only in such an analytical context, I argue, that we can understand both the possibilities and limits of international law in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
2-3 October 2026
While we particularly encourage engagements with the theme of “Freedom” for this year’s conference, we also welcome papers on any number of topics that contribute to critical research and radical scholarhip thereby enrichinging the Marxist tradition by expanding its range of interlocutors.
The most urgent political struggle of our time is a struggle for freedom: The struggle for a free Palestine. For the 11th annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies, the theme is freedom. With its rejection of bourgeois freedom, the Marxist tradition might be thought to be uninterested in the question of freedom altogether. However, Marx’s writings and the history of communist struggle offers several articulations of the meaning of freedom. With this year’s conference, we are interested in exploring distinctly communist conceptions of freedom that arise from within the Marxist tradition and how they are articulated in and informed by concrete struggles today.
Throughout history, we have seen struggles for freedom take the shape of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist struggles. What can be learned from the tools, analyses and tactics developed in these struggles? Drawing on the abolitionist notion that freedom is a place, it becomes clear that communist struggles are inherently entwined with building, sustaining, and organizing places free from state violence and exploitation. From the Paris Commune to Rojava, building revolutionary places of freedom entails a radical restructuring of life as we know it, revealing the possibility of new potential forms of freedom in social and intimate relations.
While it is a central task for radical scholarship to excavate and develop positive notions of freedom from communist struggles and Marxist lineages, it is also relevant to consider how freedom is invoked in the name of unfreedom. This is particularly relevant today, where liberal democracies cement state power by expanding settler colonial projects and carceral infrastructures, attacking labor and bodily autonomy, and reconfiguring technological and military power. Contemporary fascisms need to be read in terms of this specific conjuncture, while remaining mindful that pockets of fascism have always been embedded within the liberal state, as black radical scholars have consistently emphasized.
Similarly, appeals to freedom are central to a range of contemporary reactionary and fascist mobilisations; fascist projects offer permission to dominate for the racially privileged few, while trad wives claim the ‘freedom’ to reject liberal feminism’s (failed) promise of gender equality. These affective appeals to freedom reveal something about the profound longing for freedom under capitalism, which we should take seriously, while at the same time rejecting them as dangerous dead-ends on the way to liberated life.
This year’s conference invites papers that engage with topics such as (but not limited to):
Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) through this form by 1 May 2026. Abstracts and presentations may be in Danish or English.
The conference is in-person only, and it will not be possible to present virtually. Attendance is free but requires registration beforehand. Please note that we are unable to provide financial support or travel reimbursement for participants. Participation in the conference dinner is only possible with pre-payment at registration. Registration will open soon.
The Danish Society for Marxist Studies (Danish: Selskab for Marxistiske Studier, SMS) is an independent academic society in Denmark. The purpose of the society is to promote interest and research in Marxism and other strands of critical thought and radical scholarship at Danish universities and institutes of higher learning, especially among early career scholars. We understand ‘Marxism’ in the broadest possible sense of the term as the critical tradition emanating from Marx’s thought in its entire historical and theoretical breadth and depth, and SMS is not committed to any one particular theoretical or political position.
Programme
Book of Abstracts
Aarhus University, Denmark
10-11 October 2025
While we particularly encourage engagements with the theme of “Abolition” for this year’s conference, we also welcome papers on any number of topics that contribute to critical research and radical scholarhip thereby enrichinging the Marxist tradition by expanding its range of interlocutors.
“We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence,” Marx and Engels once famously wrote. The word ‘communism’ to them did not signify some utopian endpoint, but rather a concrete engagement with a concretely existing state of affairs standing in the way of social liberation. Today, as the extreme right is attacking liberal institutions from within, critical scholarship has the urgent task to provide an alternative perspective on what it means to abolish in order to reconfigure.
Contemporary abolitionist discourse has been crucially shaped through black radicalism during the twentieth century. Drawing on the collective memory of slavery, this intellectual and political movement criticised the unfulfilled promises of anti-racist governing and interracial democracy. Appropriating Marxist categories, they analysed the conditions for life in a society built on colonialism, while black activists struggled against the police and other state institutions of racial and carceral capitalism.
In recent years, we have seen a surge in abolitionist discourse and practice, which became especially visible during the Georg Floyd protests. Abolition puts into question not only private property, but also the wide range of social forms it depends on such as racism, borders, prisons, and militarism. Feminist and queer abolitionists, working towards liberated forms of living, have adopted and renewed the abolitionist epistemology to criticise capitalist and colonial structures imposed on gender and social reproduction. Abolition is the decisive rejection of power differences and a radical strategy towards liberation; it is both the context and content of social struggle.
The concept of abolition assembles under its banner a broad range of critical theoretical traditions and analytical strategies; it marks a common direction, yet a plurality of approaches. In a call for a world beyond sexism, racism, police, and prisons, the Danish Society for Marxist Studies invites researchers from all fields and strains of critical research and radical scholarship to engage with abolition as a broadly conceived project of liberation.
We welcome papers that engage with topics such as (but not limited to) the following:
Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) through this form by 1 May 2025. Abstracts and presentations may be in Danish or English.
The conference is in-person only, and it will not be possible to present virtually. Attendance is free but requires registration beforehand. Participation in the conference dinner is only possible with pre-payment at registration, which will open in the summer.
The Danish Society for Marxist Studies (Danish: Selskab for Marxistiske Studier, SMS) is an independent academic society in Denmark. The purpose of the society is to promote interest and research in Marxism and other strands of critical thought and radical scholarship at Danish universities and institutes of higher learning, especially among early career scholars. We understand ‘Marxism’ in the broadest possible sense of the term as the critical tradition emanating from Marx’s thought in its entire historical and theoretical breadth and depth, and SMS is not committed to any one particular theoretical or political position.
It’s almost time for our 9th annual conference, Class and its Dis/Contents! We are very much looking forward to welcoming everyone in Copenhagen.
The programme and the book of abstracts for the conference are now ready.
View and download them here:
If you haven’t already, remember to register for the conference here before 29 September. Its ✨free✨ and there are even still a few available spots for the conference dinner!
We are excited to welcome you to our 9th annual conference, held this year at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Copenhagen on 4-5 October 2024.
While the deadline for submitting an abstract has come and gone, everyone is free to participate in the conference with registration. We only require registration in order to know how much coffee and snacks to order (and to be able to potentially document attendance when trying to get money for next year’s conference!).
To register, go here:
This is also where you can register for the conference dinner on Friday evening (limited availability).
If you need to book accommodation in Copenhagen, we have managed to secure a 10% discount at the following hotels:
We look forward to seeing you in Copenhagen!
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9th Annual Conference
