Author: Selskab for Marxistiske Studier

Selskab for Marxistiske Studier er en akademisk organisation, der har til formål at fremme akademisk forskning i og inspireret af Karl Marx og marxismens kritiske forskningsprogram i Danmark.

Keynote: Eva von Redecker

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:

The Freedom to Stay. On Emancipation from Negative Liberty.

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.

Registration is open for the 11th conference!

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.

Keynote: Rob Knox

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:

Palestinian Liberation, Racialisation and the Limits of 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.

Call for Abstracts: 11th annual conference

Freedom

Eleventh annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
2-3 October 2026

Open call

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):

  • Specifically communist ideas of freedom and their articulation in concrete historical and contemporary emancipatory struggles 
  • Global struggles against imperialist expansion, colonial war, and authoritarian regimes 
  • The carceral state and infrastructures of unfreedom such as borders, prisons, walls and camps 
  • Struggles for bodily autonomy, such as trans liberation, abortion access, reproductive justice, and children’s liberation, and the ways in which these might inform a communist vision of freedom
  • Abolition, marronage and fugitivity as visions, strategies and histories of emancipation
  • Fascist fantasies of freedom, their mobilizing and affective appeal, as well as their implications for antifascist strategy
  • Freedom in relation to care and care labour; the relation between care and coercion, feminist struggles read as struggles for the freedom to care, analysis of struggles for freedom from care
  • Marxist feminist formulations of freedom vis-à-vis the liberal feminist promise of choice
  • State repression, surveillance and the use of law against political movements and dissidents, and counter-tactics claiming the freedom to assemble and organize
  • Love, sex and intimacy under capitalism, interrogations of liberal concepts of free love, and communist prospects for emancipated life through new intimacies and ‘comradely love’
  • Technology, such as the production, use and importance of technologies within and against capitalist social systems, in projects of unfreedom, or emancipatory struggles
  • Marxist visions of freedom and perspectives on the future, utopianism, alternatives, and transitions

Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) through this form by 1 May 2026. Abstracts and presentations may be in Danish or English.

Please note

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.

Call for Abstracts: 10th annual conference

Abolition

Tenth annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies

Aarhus University, Denmark
10-11 October 2025

Open call

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:

  • Abolition and political organisation
  • Abolitionist strategies against, beyond, and within the state
  • Empirical engagements with rejections of reformism
  • Critiques of and alternatives to abolitionism
  • Queer and feminist liberation
  • Settler colonialism
  • Prison abolition
  • Family abolition
  • Abolition of (private) property
  • The relationship between abolition and freedom
  • Successes and pitfalls of prior abolitionist efforts

Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) through this form by 1 May 2025. Abstracts and presentations may be in Danish or English.  

Please note

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.

9th conference: Programme & abstracts

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:

Program 2024 final formattedDownload
SMS2024_Book of Abstracts_FinalDownload

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!

9th conference: Registration is open!

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:

Registration

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:

  • CABINN Hotels (use the code “CABINN2024” when booking).
  • WakeUp Copenhagen (by booking through this link)

We look forward to seeing you in Copenhagen!

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9th Annual Conference

Call for Abstracts: Extension of deadline

Thank you to all of those who have already submitted great abstracts! We appreciate the time and effort you have put into them, as well as the general interest in the conference.

However, to be sure that we put the best possible conference together this year, we have decided to extend the deadline for submitting your abstract.

The new deadline is 14 May 2024.

Read the full call for papers here and submit your abstract here.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts!

Call for Abstracts: 9th annual conference

Class and Its Dis/Contents

Ninth annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies

University of Copenhagen, Denmark
4-5 October 2024

Open call

While we particularly encourage engagements with the theme of “Class and Its Dis/Contents” for this year’s conference, we also welcome papers on any number of topics that contribute to critical research and thereby to enriching the Marxist tradition by expanding its range of interlocutors.

The last half of the twentieth century saw the traditional industrial working class in the West decompose and its institutions suffer a series of decisive defeats. This has left a growing number of “surplus populations” exposed to the naked imperatives of neoliberalism and increasingly militarised policing of intersecting hierarchies of class, race, gender, and colonialism.

These developments have shattered traditional ideas of the working class as the unified subject of history, but it has not necessarily changed its contents. Marx already identified the proletariat as a (non-)class defined solely by its lack of access to the means of reproducing its existence independently and whose emancipation could therefore only be realised through its self-abolition. Moreover, subsequent dissidents in the workers’ movement have long emphasised the interlocking contradictions of racialization, sexism, and colonialism that underpin and structure classical conceptions of the working class in an effort to overcome them. Such contradictions have increasingly come to the fore in recent struggles against capitalist forms of exploitation, oppression, appropriation, exclusion, incarceration, and extermination across the globe.

So where are we now? What happens to Marxist theories of class when we take such interlocking contradictions seriously? For this conference, we encourage contributions that critically engage with the intersections and interactions of class and other forms of classification. Our ambition is to bring about an undogmatic meditation on the concept of “class” and its limits, its theoretical underpinnings across historically and geographically shifting political and economic realities, and its practical — that is to say, political — consequences. Topics of interest might include, but are not limited to:

  • How have global production chains and processes of de/-industrialization affected the technical and political composition of class across the globe?
  • How does class intersect and interact with other social classifications such as race, gender, sex, and dis-/ability? When and where do they reinforce or challenge one another and how can this be exploited?
  • How have different social groups historically constituted themselves as classes through aesthetic expression, and how do they continue to do so?
  • How have class and its various contradictions been thought and mobilised politically throughout history?
  • What conception of class might be relevant for contemporary anti-capitalist struggles and movements?
  • How have attempts to construct and mobilise alternative political subjects (‘the people’, ‘the multitude’, etc.) fared as the basis of anti-capitalist politics?
  • What is the relationship between domestic class structures and the global division of labour and what are the implications for local and internationalist struggles?
  • How do class dynamics intersect with colonial dynamics in Israel-Palestine?
  • What would it entail for historical materialism to decenter the working class?
  • What can be garnered from contemporary debates about the social and political primacy of different forms of exploitation and oppression in relation to strategies for liberation? 
  • What would the self-abolition of the proletariat look like if we took the interlocking contradictions that structure it seriously?

Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) through this form by 1 May 2024 EXTENDED: 14 May 2024. Abstracts and presentations may be in Danish or English.

Please note:

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.

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 further interest and research in Marxism and other strands of critical thought 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.