Freedom

Eleventh annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
2-3 October 2026

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.