The preliminary programme for our eighth annual conference, “The National and the International”, is now available:
Abstracts
The deplorable and the respectable: Economic ideas in Danish social policy 1891-1933
Anders Sevelsted and Troels Krarup
Scientific paradigms such as Malthusianism, eugenics, and social economics indicate different ways of thinking economically about social policy. Each paradigm is embedded in a comprehensive set of ideas about the role and purpose of social policy in society. In this paper, the authors analyze the relationship between religious, cultural, and economic ideas in Danish social policy from 1891 till 1933. Building on the concepts of moral elites and theological economy, the analysis is conducted by analyzing writings by two prominent figures in the early and the later part of the period: Statistics Professor and Christian socialist Harald Westergaard (1853-1936) and Social Democratic Minister of Social Affairs K. K. Steincke (1880-1963). At first glance, the two could not be more different: One a protagonist of Christian voluntary social work, the other the architect of the emerging welfare state and a harsh critic of philanthropy. However, a closer look reveals striking similarities as well: Westergaard spearheaded economic thinking in social policy and co-founded the Anthropological committee which would be key in the eugenic program in social policy that Steincke adhered to – a program that aimed to eliminate the non-productive individuals by limiting reproductive rights. Moreover, the two had overlapping Christian worldviews that influenced their position on the role of the family and the role of philanthropy in social policy. Most importantly, the two exhibit similarities in respect to the envisioned aim of social policy: Not merely survival, but spiritual growth. The paper ends with a discussion of the relationship between economic ideas and cultural ideals in the present.
Art and contemporary Scandinavian capitalism
Anette Svane
We live in a post-theoretical, post-critical time, claims Horea Poenar (2018), where art has lost “its ability of resistance” and become banal or mere effect. Under the pervasive power of what Mark Fisher (2009) famously deemed capitalist realism, cultural products can perform anti-capitalism for us in ways that only serve to reinforce capitalist structures. Stefanie Baumann (2021) points to how standardization of cultural expressions shape and perpetually endorse perceptual habits under modern capitalism. Given these perspectives, the question becomes whether, and how, we can talk about art and resistance under contemporary conditions. With this paper I will explore certain aspects of what this means for art under contemporary Scandinavian capitalism.
Engaging with some recent examples of Scandinavian television shows and film, I will point to how they play with and against contemporary capitalism, specifically at the level of form. I will pay particular attention to the way that these moving images relate to the specificity of Scandinavian ‘culture’ and politics, arguing that there are (formal) cracks to be found despite the increasing dominance of market ideology. My contention is that these cracks may guide us on the way to a system beyond capitalism, but this is dependent on rethinking what it means for art to resist.
The theory of the firm and the spectre of Marx
Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen
The ‘theory of the firm’ designates a number of economic and managerial theories that emerged in the beginning of the 20th century and was later fully developed by the Chicago School of economy in the post-war decades. For its practitioners, the theory of the firm explain the nature, structure, and behaviour of modern corporations in technical, economic, and non-political terms. The intellectual groundwork for the theory of the firm is developed by the economists Frank Knight and Ronald Coase in the 1920s and 1930s. Although both ardent free market liberals and early members of the Mont Pelerin Society, Knight and Coase recognize that the laissez-faire account of capitalism inherited from 19th century liberals fails to understand the relations of hierarchy, authority, command, and obedience which do exist within the modern business corporation. In fact, for Knight and Coase, the business corporation is only an effective organizational form of coordination vis-à-vis the markets’ price mechanism due to its internal relations of hierarchy and authority. Drawing on Marx’ insights on the difference between ‘free’ market exchange and exploitative production as well as on Elizabeth Anderson’s notion of corporations as ‘private governments’, the paper reconstructs these early 20th century theories of firm, and explores how the discipline of economics seek to depoliticize and legitimize workplace domination and authoritarian relations of power within the economy.
What is Geopolitical Marxism? Radical historicism and international politics in Marxist IR
Benno Teschke
Political Marxism (PM) is best known for a series of innovative studies on the subject of country-specific transitions to capitalism. This literature works, as a rule, within the confines of single-country studies (methodological nationalism) or comparative history. Inversely, Marxist paradigms in the field of International Relations (Classical Theories of Imperialism/Neo-Leninism, WST, Neo-Gramscian IR, UCD) remain afflicted by a recurrent theoretical and empirical problem: the absence of a dedicated approach to the historical sociology of international politics. As a rule, the study of foreign policy making and the encounter between multiple foreign policies in the sphere of international politics is subsumed under wider sociological patterns or structural imperatives prevailing within and between political communities. If PM and Marxist IR are over-sociologised and under-geopoliticised, how can Geopolitical Marxism rectify and overcome this problem? This question involves a methodological reflection on how to capture and validate the sphere of grand-strategy making, high politics and international diplomacy in its significance for the international management of transitions and non-transitions to capitalism. Radical Historicism in this sense requires not only a focus on spatio-temporal specificity, it also requires ‘the rescue of foreign policy elites, grand strategy makers and diplomats from the enormous condescension of Marxist posterity’. Empirically, the paper demonstrates how this shift towards the making of geopolitics changes our historical narrative of the 1815 Treaty of Vienna and its world-ordering consequences.
Reclaiming the urban housing common: ‘Common Resistance’ against Denmark’s ‘Ghetto Law’
Bjarke Skærlund Risager and Søren Christensen
Located between state and market, and governed by resident democracy, Danish non-profit ‘common housing’ (almene boliger) has traditionally lived up to its ‘common’ name as a self-organized and decommodified good. Recent decades have, however, seen increasing efforts to enclose this common through neoliberal marketization and political control culminating with the 2018 ‘Ghetto Law’. The latter compelled housing associations to significantly reduce non-profit housing in areas stigmatized as ‘hard ghettos’, primarily via development and marketization of housing and land. To make the implementation of this legislation more efficient, the legislation stripped democratic power from the local resident boards. Conceived within the theoretical-political framework of the urban common, Denmark’s ‘Ghetto Law’ demonstrates that the latter is an ongoing conflictual practice subject to both state regulation and capital accumulation. Further, as this practice concerns the common both as resource, institution, and community, the legislation also demonstrates that enclosure not only involves ‘common housing’ stock but also its democratic self-governance and resident community. Against this backdrop of enclosure, the main focus of this paper is how the ‘Ghetto Law’ has also spurred residents at risk of displacement and enclosure to reclaim their housing common. Focusing on the activities of the grassroots resident network Almen Modstand (Common Resistance), this paper will map the network’s practices of resistance and reclamation. We understand this reclamation of the housing common, like its enclosure, to concern not just a material resource: reclaiming common housing might also involve revitalizing common resident democracy and community.
Why Pashukanis was right – Abstraction and form in the general theory of law and Marxism
Carl Wilén
The area of Marxism and law has long been considered marginalised. However, hand in hand with the renaissance of Marxist theory in recent decades, neglect has finally been put to rest. As Marxists increasingly explore the connections between rights, law, democracy and capitalism, one text in particular has taken centre stage: The General Theory of Law and Marxism, published by E. B. Pashukanis in 1924. This paper seeks to make three contributions to the field of Marxism and law. First, by proposing that Pashukanis’s polemic is best understood as a critique of a spectrum between formalism and instrumentalism, containing both differences and similarities, it rectifies the way in which these concepts most often either have been discussed at a too general level or been defined too narrowly. Second, by addressing the status of the concepts of abstraction and form in Pashukanis, it reconstructs the concept of the legal form according to the spirit of his thought to supersede the limits of the formalism-instrumentalism spectrum, despite the unevenness found in the letter of his text. Third, with respect to the reconstruction of the concept of the legal form, it demonstrates how objections against Pashukanis’s focus on the sphere of circulation at the cost of production, his exclusion of inequalities of race and gender, his failure to recognise the emancipatory potential of law, and his structuralist, consequentialist or instrumentalist biases, which reduces the space for agency, processes and the relative autonomy of politics, ideology and law, can be neutralised
What’s needed for a radical theory of finance
Carolina Alves
(Abtract TBA)
A typology of elites and classes
Christoph Houman Ellersgaard
Recent years have seen a proliferation in the studies of elites. From being ‘forgotten by the social sciences’ (Savage and Williams 2008) a decade and a half ago, elites have become a key topic in contemporary social sciences. However, the concept is used without much empirical clarification. Indeed some claim that ‘the word elite is probably one of the most misused words in the sociological lexicon’ (Scott 2003, 155). In particular the relationship between studies of elites and classes remain undertheorized. This pertains both to the relationship between elites and dominated classes and the relationship between various elite groups and concepts such as ‘the ruling class’ or ‘hegemonic blocs’. In this paper, I propose some conceptual clarifications to distinguish between elites and classes in ways which allow us to discuss how the concept of elite may help us understand class agency or lack thereof. Based on the frameworks of Mills and Bourdieu, I suggest avenues to understand how the social organisation of elites can help us understand how class relations unfold in contemporary societies. Lastly, I provide illustrations of particular elite constellations which enables or disrupts class action both within the capitalist class and the working class. These serve to illustrate that the social organisation of elites must be understood when understanding the relationship between the national and international and the extent to which the political power of capital is able to cross borders.
“… a very good way of separating the sheep from the goats”: The national question between South Africa and the Comintern
Daniel Badenhorst
Frantz Fanon wrote that, ‘It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows’. This deliciously dialectical dictum is emblematic of Fanon’s thoughts about the primacy of the national liberation struggles in colonial countries and his decidedly ‘unorthodox’ approach to the Marxist analysis race, nation, and class. For many, Fanon’s journalism, speeches, and books have become veritable treasure troves of ‘correctives’ to the Marxist account of the colonial situation. Yet, more often than not, those that turn to Fanon’s work to stretch, supplement or scold Marxism neither situate Fanon in his historical context nor do they bother to assess the legacy of Marxist thinking about the national or colonial questions in the African context. By focusing on the case of South African Marxism, this paper will document the way that Marxists in the mid-20th century dealt with the national and colonial questions. More specifically, it will use the case of South Africa to explore the complex and mutually determinative theoretical–practical relationship between international and national communist groups. It will be seen that not only was Fanon’s thinking about the colonial question reflective of African and international trends but that his positions were almost entirely accepted in some way or other by prominent communist organisations. In fact, the Comintern chastised the Parti communiste français for the line it took on Algeria, which demonstrates that while French communists may have needed schooling on the national and colonial questions, this was far from true in the international context.
The begging question: Sweden’s social responses to the Roma destitute
Erik Hansson
Begging, thought to be an inherently un-Swedish phenomenon, became a national fixture in the 2010s as homeless Romanian and Bulgarian Roma EU citizens arrived in Sweden seeking economic opportunity. People without shelter were forced to use public spaces as their private space, disturbing aesthetic and normative orders, creating anxiety among Swedish subjects and resulting in hate crimes and everyday racism. Parallel with Europe’s refugee crisis in the 2010s, the “begging question” peaked. The presence of the media’s so-called EU migrants caused a crisis in Swedish society along political, juridical, moral, and social lines due to the contradiction embodied in the Swedish authorities’ denial of social support to them while simultaneously seeking to maintain the nation’s image as promoting welfare, equality, and antiracism. In The Begging Question Erik Hansson argues that the material configurations of capitalism and class society are not only racialized but also unconsciously invested with collective anxieties and desires. By focusing on Swedish society’s response to the begging question, Hansson provides insight into the dialectics of racism. He shrewdly deploys Marxian economics and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain how it became possible to do what once was thought impossible: criminalize begging and make fascism politically mainstream, in Sweden. What Hansson reveals is not just an insight into one of the most captivating countries on earth but also a timely glimpse into what it means to be human.
Af med Hovedaftalen – Deindustrialiseirng og atomisering af det danske arbejdsmarked
Eskil Halberg
Den såkaldte ”danske model” blev til i en voldsom hungerkrig iværksat af primært københavnske arbejdsgiverne. Den danske model er historisk i bedste fald et kompromis mellem arbejderbevægelsen og kapitalen. I oplægget vil jeg argumentere for, at den danske model har udspillet sin historiske rolle som middel til sociale fremskridt for lønmodtagerne. Det skyldes først og fremmest deindustrialiseringen af det danske arbejdsmarked, der har ført til atomisering, fleksibilisering og individualisering af arbejdsmarkedet som følge af afviklingen af de store industriarbejdspladser fra første halvdel af det 20. århundrede. Opsugningen af arbejdskraft sker først og fremmest i servicesektoren og den offentlige sektor, hvor den danske model ikke giver lønmodtagere nær den samme forhandlingsmagt. Dette af teknologiske og økonomiske årsager. Dette har ført til demobilisering (faldende medlemstal i FH). Sideløbende har fagbevægelsen omorganiseret sig til i stigende grad at lave interessevaretagelse i form af lobbyisme i stedet for at udvikle nye kampstrategier på arbejdspladser og i sociale bevægelser. En strategi der viste sig at fejle ved afviklingen af Store Bededag i 2023. Fagbevægelsens krise er derfor ikke i første omgang en politisk-idémæssig krise, som handler om manglende evne til at bygge identitetsmæssig tilknytning til arbejderbevægelsen. Det er et langt mere omfattende strukturelt problem, der udgår fra den politisk-økonomiske udvikling i den vestlige verden. Kort sagt er den danske fagbevægelse fucked på et dybere plan end blot deres manglende evne til at ”forklare lønmodtagerne”, hvorfor det er vigtigt at være fagligt organiseret.
Ecological Marxism as a new form of internationalism
Georganna Ulary
Revolutionary theory and praxis aimed at social transformation has always been hampered by the conflict between local and national struggles (with their particular concrete demands & tensions), and international struggles. To critically address these tensions, a new foundation of internationalism is needed, a foundation with the potential to unite and motivate not just “workers around the world,” but all world citizens. Traditionally, proletarian internationalism coalesced around the project of worker solidarity forged within the hidden abode of production – on the factory floor, in the trade union movements, in the fields of farmworkers, etc. This conventional foundation for international class struggle, while still valuable, remains ineffectual today for several reasons. As theoretically appealing as it is, materially, it comes up short as a transformative agent. This paper examines a new foundation of internationalism (of international solidarity and praxis) which has the potential to overcome the barriers of the traditional form. Generally, I suggest that ecological Marxism offers a promising new theoretical foundation for internationalism; more specifically, I critically evaluate the “environmental proletariat” (a term coined by John Bellamy Foster) as the most promising contemporary agent for revolutionary praxis. First, I diagnose some of the most salient limitations of the conventional form of internationalism. Next, I give reasons for why ecological Marxism (with its emphasis on the metabolic relation between humans and nature) serves as a promising new ground for internationalism. Finally, I critically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the environmental proletariat to act as the new agent for international struggles.
Women and migrants in the Italian labor market: An investigation of the exploitative dynamics in the reproductive sphere
Gianmaria Brunazzi
This paper examines the relationship between class, gender, and racial oppression within the Italian labor market, using it as a case study to explore some theoretical implications in Marxist theory. Specifically, it investigates the correlation between Italian women’s emancipation, starting by the early 1980s, and the massive absorption of poor migrant women, into the Italian care system. During the rise of neoliberalism, which prompted the definitive inclusion of women in the productive system, the Italian welfare system – despite feminist struggles, and because of deeply rooted cultural factors – was deeply inadequate to meet families’ needs. Women from poor countries, in this context, due to their vulnerability stemming from economic, gender and racial factors, were drawn as the ideal substitutes for Italian women in the realm of care work. The capitalist expansion of the eighties, in Italy, were made possible by innovative forms of mixed exploitation and a peculiar resurgence of domestic work – which was no longer solely associated with high social status, but extended to broader segments of the population, particularly in large cities. While many Marxists argue that “in the abstract, capitalism does not require racialized and gendered forms of exploitation” (Wood, 2015, p.276) due to the hierarchical primacy that they attribute to capital-centric rules of value-extraction, concrete historical experiences reveal that dominant classes constantly (not exceptionally) recur to pre-capitalist forms of extraction to relaunch capitalist accumulation. Our case study, from this perspective, enables us to develop broad-spectrum reflections on a never solved fracture in Marxism between history and theory: between the primacy of class struggle and that of capitalist economic laws of motion.
What was socialization?
Jacob Blumenfeld
In this talk, I will attempt to lay out the background of this “socialization debate” after the German Revolution, with the goal of disentangling the variety of proposals for economic transformation, reform, and revolution contained within this single, overdetermined concept. The demand for socialization—of property, the economy, the workplace, the family, the state—surged from below and came from above, with very different connotations. In my talk, I will thus focus on one of the first texts to systematize the various ideas of socialization called Sozialisierung: Versuch einer begrifflichen Grundlegung nebst einer Kritik der Sozialisierungspläne (1921), by Felix Weil, who founded the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt two years later. Alongside this text, I will discuss works on socialization by Karl Korsch, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Otto Neurath, Walther Rathenau, Rudolf Hilferding, and Otto Bauer. One argument I will make is that socialization was a strategically ambiguous term, which allowed even its opponents to claim it and redefine it in their interests.
Peter Thiel’s From Zero to One and the end of neoliberal internationalism
James Rushing Daniel
In 2014, PayPal founder Peter Thiel (with venture capitalist Blake Masters) published From Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, a bestseller that is considered by some to be one of the most noteworthy texts on contemporary entrepreneurship (Thompson). Beyond offering a lengthy explanation of a metaphor for successful innovation, From Zero to One marks a pivotal moment in the rhetoric of the technology industry, and in the narrative contemporary capitalism more broadly, in which “progressive neoliberalism” (Fraser) began to shift toward what Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval call “the new neoliberalism,” an explicitly reactionary model of capitalism dominant today. This paper will analyze how From Zero to One, posing as guide to innovation in the technology sector, formulated a comprehensive rejection of the cosmopolitan capitalism of the early 2000s that presaged not only the rise of Trumpism but the conservative shift (Burmila) of the American Democratic Left as well. Looking to the Thiel’s dismissal of “neoliberal internationalism” (Amin), his disparagement of globalization as “horizontal progress,” and his embrace of monopoly capital (Baran and Sweezy), this paper will illustrate how the text articulates a model of capitalist innovation in open conflict with the heretofore globalist (Slobodian) sensibilities of neoliberalism. The paper will additionally historicize the text in the broader narrative of global capitalism’s cultural shift led by what Wolfgang Streeck calls “the new protectionists,” typified today by such figures as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Sexuality, solidarity, and strategy – How capitalism has shaped intimate relations globally and the possibilities of progressive forms of relating
Jeannette Søgaard
Many will argue that we have gained the most gender and sexual minority rights and sexual liberation under the capitalist mode of production and that our current system provides the best conditions for expressing free authentic sexualities and intimate ways of relating. I will show with Kimberly Tallbear how capitalism and sexuality historically have been interconnected e.g., how oppressive colonialist sexual legislation on monogamy and marriage has been a tool in primary accumulation strategies accelerating the global expansion of capitalism. In line with the Marxist feminist’s social reproduction framework, I also argue that sexual coercion is not only the kind of oppression that occur from sexual and gender-based violence and legislation against minorities, but also coercion that comes from capitalism’s need for stabile forms to reproduce labour power. Lastly, I will touch upon the possibilities of progressive forms of intimate relating. Is there any progressive political potential at all in experimenting with alternative forms of intimate relating?
How member-based democracy helped integrate climate concerns in investment policies: The case of AkademikerPension’s wide-ranging divestment decision
Johannes Lundberg
Within the last decade, researchers have increasingly discussed the growing role of investors in the climate crisis and the effects of divestment, yet we know little about the exact dynamics and governance structures that shape divestment decisions of institutional investors. Thus, in this presentation, I examine the process of institutional change in AkademikerPension, a democratically governed Danish pension fund. I focus specifically on their process from flatly dismissing proposals to divest (i.e., excluding investments in coal, oil, and gas) in 2014 to becom one of the most climate-progressive global institutional investors by 2022. Through an original analysis of qualitative data, including general assembly minutes, annual and sustainability reports, media coverage, and interviews with board members, administrators, and pension members, I identify the factors that drove AkademikerPension’s significant investment strategy shift. Particularly, I highlight the role of the following four factors: the formalized democratic channels for members’ various considerations to be taken into account; the administration’s internal financial analyses; board and administration replacements; and the insistent pressure from NGOs, media, and member networks. This investigation contributes to ongoing debates in political economy, particularly with respect to the possibilities of establishing democratic member-based alternatives within financial institutions. By focusing on the institutional transformation process of the divestment decision, this study sheds light on how changes in climate-related investment policies can occur. Furthermore, the case indicates the possibility of supplementing quantitative goals with qualitative criteria and considerations in financial decision-making processes.
Imperialism and the militarization of Africa
Karen Helveg Petersen
Africa is, increasingly, host to multiple interventions by major powers. The US, EU (France), China, Russia, UK, India and Arab states compete for influence through investment and aid, market access and the offer of lenient borrowing terms. In addition, military cooperation, augmented by covert operations, is on the rise. The present militarization of Africa is articulated through both old-fashioned and new-fangled imperialism but also takes the shape of an expansion of domestic African military forces that have played a strong political role throughout the post-colonial era. The elements of analysis are, 1. Protection of ‘imperial’ interests in mining and major investment projects, 2. Outside interference in internal conflicts, 3. Military assistance and bases, 4. Private armies hired by corporate interests or local governments, 5. Sale of military equipment/preferred suppliers, 6. African countries as allied partners, 7. Support to African peace-making efforts, 8. African rearmament by own means. The paper tallies military resource deployment by the different parties. Does enhanced domestic military spending impair countries’ social and development efforts? The face-off between Western and other external powers reflects the renewed recognition of Africa’s economic and strategic importance. Although African countries are taking on their own cause, they are hampered in reclaiming full autonomy by the perpetuation of their heavy debt burden as a result of dependency on major powers and institutions such as the World Bank for technology/capital equipment and major infrastructure investments. This calls for a new determination of ‘imperialism’ as a conflictual and contradictory struggle about power and self-determination.
The internationalism of the Communist Women’s Movement
Ksenia Arapko
The Communist Women’s Movement (CWM) was founded as a section of the Communist International in 1921. Functioning with a high degree of autonomy, the CWM sought to advance the struggle of communism among women on an international scale. Few discussions have been had about the historical role of the movement. What little has been examined about the CWM has, somewhat expectedly, focused specifically on the question of women and women’s liberation. The communist women leaders spearheading the efforts of CWM, however, contributed significantly to the theoretical developments and practical struggles of socialist internationalism. The movement directed efforts at home and aboard through its interventions in parties, journals, conferences, and resolutions in the Comintern world congresses. In looking at the formation and early days of the movement, this paper will begin to unearth the contributions of communist women to the struggle for internationalism which to this day have been severely neglected.
Roots or branches of the climate crisis
Lotte Schack
The climate movement is frequently charged with being depoliticized, both by academics and activists from other movements. This often concerns movement groups’ reluctancy to placing themselves on the political spectrum and defining clear adversaries and allies. In this paper I however criticize this conception of depoliticization. Here, I argue, politicization is understood in an essentially liberal manner and presented in oversimplified terms, missing important points of contention. To illustrate this, I trace a conflict in a local Swedish branch of Fridays for Future (FFF), drawing on ethnographic fieldwork. Some activists wanted to keep strictly to the climate issue, arguing against cooperating with groups not concerned with the climate. Others wanted to work ‘intersectionally’, highlighting connections with other unjust systems such as capitalism and colonialism through cooperation with other groups. While this could be interpreted as a conflict between politicizing and depoliticizing tendencies, such a reading neglects important aspects. Through an alternative reading, I compare the conflict to the debate within Marxist feminism about the connection between gender oppression and capitalism. The described conflict could be understood in analogous terms, namely as concerning the relationships between the climate crisis and other injustices. While all the activists agreed that such relationships existed, the point of contention was rather how they were related: in the words of one activist, what are the roots and what are the branches? I argue that these kinds of conflicts, rather than risking depoliticizing the movement, should instead be seen as a hotbed for further movement analysis and strategizing.
Autonomy through national industrialization as the form of international surplus transfer to industrialized countries: the case of VW do Brasil
Luis Cortés
Industrialization is seen as the key to allow “Global South” countries to attain autonomy in an international system that keeps them in an underdeveloped and subordinate position. From these approaches, the national sphere in these countries would be restricted by their dependency towards core imperialist countries, and its expansion would imply less value transferred toward these economies. In contrast with the above, this presentation will argue that in principle capital accumulation is international, although it appears concretely in national forms. Thus, the national sphere never exists in isolation: its underlying content is always international. This means that developmentalist strategies are not forms of breaking with the international, but the political expression of it. This will be shown in the analysis of a subsidiary company that operates in apparent isolation from its HQ: VW do Brasil, a subsidiary of Volkswagen. In particular, the implementation of modularization from 1995 onwards is presented as a recuperation of profitability through investment and innovation as a consequence of the relative autonomy of the subsidiary. However, seen from an international perspective, the investment in Brazil is the liquidation of obsolete capital from broke companies liquidated during a global concentration process of the automobile industry. Brazil’s subsidiary can operate under the average productivity through subsidies sustained by the extraordinary ground rent from natural resources. Thus, industrialization in rentist countries uncovers a transfer of surplus value from a country whose specificity is the production of commodities that bear ground-rent towards a major industrialized European economy.
Cannibals and animals of Capital: On dehumanisation and the capitalist grotesque
Magnus Møller Ziegler
In the final pages of Capital volume one, Marx likens exploitation to cannibalism. There is, he says, nothing that prevents one person from offloading their necessary work on another, just as there is nothing preventing one person from eating another. Following David McNally, I argue that this simile is not simply literary hyperbole but rather what McNally calls a ‘literal metaphor’ potent with theoretical meaning and implications. In this paper, I argue that Marx’s Gothic metaphor of the cannibal – along with the vampire, the ghost, and the werewolf – should be read in light of his commitment to seeking out the grotesqueness of capitalism, i.e., capital’s normalisation of monstrosity in the form of a colonisation of our corporeal being and experience of everyday life. Further, I argue that this emphasis on the grotesque can be traced back to Marx’s intellectual partnership with Friedrich Engels and Moses Hess in the mid-1840’s, and that his continued commitment to this theoretically laden metaphorical language also suggests a continued commitment to a theory of the ontological dehumanisation of workers under capitalism: It is not just that workers are treated inhumanely; under the capitalist grotesque, they cease, in an ontologically meaningful sense, to be human altogether.
Capitalocene didactics: On the revolutionary potential of schools
Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen
Since the great education reforms in the 19th century, school systems have been used throughout the world for nation building purposes. Formalized schooling has been mobilized as a powerful means for nationalistic ends. However, since the rise of environmental education and, now, education for sustainable development, school systems have begun to reorient themselves to transnational problems such as the climate and biodiversity crises. Hence, ‘the environment’ now appears as the new international horizon for strategic interventions with a view to disrupting the radically unsustainable system that has produced the abyssal predicaments of the Capitalocene. In my presentation, I will share didactic reflections on how schools can serve as local sites of disruption. Disruption, that is, of the growth ideology of capitalist realism as it has been politically managed and propagated by the OECD countries. I will also present 1-2 empirical cases from an ethnographic fieldwork illustrating how such disruption might look like in practice and how it can meaningfully contribute to children’s learning and development. Unavoidably, schools are ideological battlegrounds. The question remains: Are we, as educators, aware of and explicit about the ideological assumptions we carry into our teaching? Or are we, by way of subtle means, implicitly persuading our students into accepting a certain view of the world – be it for or against the current system of ecological destruction? I will present capitalocene didactics as the name for an historically urgent reconfiguration of how the climate and biodiversity crises and sustainable development are taught in schools.
The separation of state and corporation in capitalism
Mathias Hein Jessen
This paper is concerned with a particular subset of the separation between the political and the economic central to the legitimation of capitalism, namely that between state and corporation. The separation of state and corporation is a central feature allowing the rise and spread of corporate power – both historically and actually – because it fundamentally misrecognizes the political constitution of the corporation, the centrality of corporations in governing social life, and shields both states and corporations from liability and accountability. The separation of state and corporation is central to the dominant corporate governance paradigm and practice of shareholder value maximization conceiving the corporation as a nexus of contracts among market individuals. However, the separation is also perpetuated by critics of corporate power who reify the state as the seat of politics and democracy and the corporation as an economic market actor, reproducing the ideological separations between the political and the economic, state and society, and public and private. The paper traces the separation of state and corporation in three historical periods: 1) the corporation as a body subject to the state in the early modern period; 2) as a rights-bearing person in 19th century Anglo-American corporate law; and 3) as a nexus of contracts or bundle of assets owned by shareholders, reducing the corporation to individual market transactions. In all three instances, the corporation is emptied of social and political content, origin and authority by conceiving it analogously to a body, person or individual.
The Viking social formation in a world systems perspective
Morten Ougaard
The paper is a contribution to historical materialist theorizing of the Viking age, based on extant historical scholarship, i.e., no new evidence. Using Samir Amin’s notion of a ‘family of tributary formations’ I suggest that the Viking formation belongs to the subtype of tributary trading formations. A defining feature of this subtype is that a significant part of wealth is derived from control over long-distance trade rather than surplus extracted from the local area. Moving up to the world-systems perspective inspired by Abu-Lughod, I argue that the rise of Viking society was enabled by its location at the intersection between the two major long-distance trade routes in Northern Europe. One route going North-South from Northern Norway via the Danish straits down to North-Western Europe and even further; the other route going East -West from The Caspian and Black Seas and beyond, through Russian rivers and overland to the Baltic and Danish waters, and from there to Northwestern Europe. Finally, I note the temporal correlation between the Viking expansion and the expansion of Islam in the Mediterranean. I suggest that Arab dominance if not control over this major southern trade route between Western Europe and the near and far orient made the alternative Northern route more attractive to Western Europe. In short, the Arab world created one of the preconditions for the Viking expansion.
Moving children, moving costs – The geography of forced adoptions in the Danish welfare state
Nanna Dahler
Forced adoptions – adoption of children without consent from their birth parents – have become a more common child welfare intervention in Danish municipalities. With reforms to adoption law in 2016 and 2021, the government has pushed for an increased use of pre-emptive adoptions as an alternative to long term foster care, arguing that adoptions provide more stability and continuity for vulnerable children. With the latest reform to the field – expected to be implemented in 2024 – it becomes possible for municipalities to complete an adoption before the birth of the child. The 98 municipalities in Denmark use forced adoptions to a wildly varying extent; in 2020 for example, half of all forced adoption cases came from two – rural and poor – municipalities. While foster care placements place children within the municipality, forced adoptions put children up for adoption to a national list of adoptive parents, most often moving them to other regions. Building on an ongoing ethnographic study of forced adoption in Danish municipalities, this paper explores the uneven geographies of forced adoption. Forced adoptions move the responsibility for some children from the public realm into the privatized system of social reproduction that is the family institution. Furthermore, they also move children, and municipal costs to child welfare, from some regions to others – largely from poor to rich regions. This paper draws on geographical approaches to social reproduction and feminist family-abolition perspectives to explore the ways in which municipal economy and welfare state retrenchment inform forced adoption politics.
Markedsmekanismer eller planlægning? Institutionelle konflikter indenfor den danske sundhedssektor under den neoliberale vending
Niklas Zenius Jespersen
Under indtryk af den neoliberale bølge, der prægede Vesteuropa fra 1970’erne og frem, kom offentlige institutioner under et voksende pres for at reducere udgifter og gennemføre reformer langs markedsøkonomiske principper. De følgende årtier så vi introduktionen af konkurrencemekanismer, privatisering, kommercialisering og konstruktionen af et marked for velfærdsydelser inden for den offentlige sektor. Denne neoliberale vending fik også fat i Danmark, men påvirkede ikke alle offentlige institutioner ligeligt. Indtil da havde den offentlige sundhedssektor i Danmark fået lov til at vokse hurtigt, uden at det havde medført kontroverser eller politiske indgreb. Men fra 1970’erne og frem søgte skiftende regeringer at begrænse de offentlige udgifter gennem indførslen af markedsmekanismer og konkurrence. Dette skete dog ikke uden modstand og udløste en konflikt inden for sektoren. Mens Sundhedsministeriet promoverede tiltagende neoliberale synspunkter i dets udgivelser, så promoverede den magtfulde og historisk set politisk uafhængige Sundhedsstyrelse en alternativ tilgang. Sundhedsstyrelsens udgivelser og politiske tiltag promoverede en tiltagende centraliseret og socialiseret offentlig planlægning, kombineret med en socioøkonomisk tænkning der advarede imod samfundskonsekvenserne af nedskæringer og samtidig forklarede, at der ikke fandtes neutrale valg, men at disse altid udsprang af interessekonflikter i samfundet. Ved at analysere udgivelser, rapporter og politiske anbefalinger fra disse to statsinstitutioner vil jeg vise de ideologiske konflikter, der brød ud mellem dem, og stille spørgsmål til, hvad sådanne inter-institutionelle konflikter betyder for vores forståelse af staten og dens klasse- og ideologiske karakter.
Productive labor in the era of digital capitalism
Søren Bøgh Sørensen
In recent debates that cut across the fields of political theory, political economy, and critical media studies, Marxist theorists have argued over whether so-called immaterial labor such as that performed by users of digital media services like Facebook and Google’s search engine can intelligibly be considered productive labor in the sense of being the source of surplus-value. Some commentators maintain that the immaterial labor performed by the users of digital social media cannot be considered productive labor as the affective networks that make social media valuable cannot be measured in terms of labor-time. Moreover, it is a contentious issue whether the profits realized by large digital media corporations are derived from the value-producing labor of the users or from the production-processes of the companies whose commodities are being advertised. This paper will explore this ‘digital labor debate’ to sketch out a suitable conceptualization of productive labor in the era of digital capitalism. Clarifying and possibly updating the concept of productive labor is important both because it can inform our understanding of the power of capital today and because an adequate theorization of this concept can bolster solidarity between all forms of exploited labor – material as well as immaterial – along the so-called ‘international division of digital labor’.
Marxism and the body
Søren Mau
Since the 1980’s, critical scholars in the humanities and social sciences have confronted the tendency in Western intellectual culture to devalue or ignore the corporeal dimensions of human existence. This ‘corporeal turn’ has been dominated by non- or anti-Marxist theoretical traditions such as phenomenology, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and new materialism, while Marxist perspectives have been perspicuously absent. In this talk, I will discuss what a Marxist contribution to the corporeal turn might look like, and pose the question of what insights a specifically Marxist approach to the body can produce, and how it differs from and relates to other approaches.
The EU Taxonomy’s sustainable corporate subject: The politics in financialising sustainability in order to finance the sustainable transition
Tessa Barnow
After adopting the EU Taxonomy in 2020, corporations were placed at the heart of the green transition and sustainable growth. It provides a universalised definition of sustainability, including technical criteria to corporations’ economic activities, based on what it terms technically, economically, and scientifically feasible and necessary alternatives. In this paper, I analyse the taxonomy’s categorisations of sustainable economic activities; examine how it rationalises corporations as subjects of a green transition; and ultimately illuminate how this apparently science-based, technical, and legislative sustainability tool is saturated with politics. I draw on Foucault’s governmentality-approach to examine the EU Taxonomy framework as expressive and co-constitutive of a particular rationality of what, how and why to govern. Particularly, this paper focuses on how corporations are made subjects of sustainability; its assumptions, prioritisations and strategies for how to conduct the conduct of corporations. I argue that the taxonomy governs the green transition from the primary problematisation of an investment gap from which follows the need to mobilise private capital and necessitates returns on investments. This naturalises the need for ‘green growth’ and places corporations at the centre of enabling a green version of the business-as-usual capitalist, liberal, and efficient economic system. In this pursuit, particular knowledges, technologies and innovations are included at the expense of alternatives, as they fit the dual ambition of economic growth and reduced carbon footprints relative to the maintenance of production and consumption levels.
Platform cooperativism and the renewal of G.D.H. Cole’s guild socialism
Tim Christiaens
In recent years, activists and academics have championed platform cooperativism as a political counterstrategy against the injustices common in the digital gig economy. Companies like Uber or Deliveroo treat their workers notoriously badly, and worker-owned cooperative platforms seem to provide a promising alternative. However, Marxists are often skeptical of this proposal. Based on the negative comments about cooperatives in the writings of Marx and Luxemburg, they argue that worker-owned cooperatives in capitalist markets will be forced to imitate the exploitative practices of their capitalist rivals. Companies that refuse to adapt to the stringent demands of the profit motive will supposedly be outcompeted. In this paper, I will defend the politics of platform cooperativism by rekindling G.D.H. Cole’s philosophy of guild socialism. Cole was a British economist and philosopher who switched between academia and the UK Labour Party throughout his life. In the early 20th century, Cole was suspicious of the centralized state-managed socialism of the Soviet-Union, and advised the Labour Party to fight for a sphere of production composed of workers’ guilds. Platform cooperativism promises to construct similar guild-like institutions in the gig economy. In my paper, I argue that the Marxist doubts concerning worker-owned platforms underestimate the capacity of worker guilds to manage market competition.
The transit fix: Border externalisation and the interplay of capital and race in the transit “migration” state
Timor Landherr
What happens after border externalization? States and regional organizations of the Global North increasingly engage in transnational migration management that seeks to prevent potential irregular migration beyond their own territory. Despite the impressive financial, political, and logistical resources the numerous involved actors mobilise to reach this goal, little is known about the effects of this strategy on their target states and populations. This paper conceptualizes border externalisation as a spatial intervention that absorbs contingent migrant flows into an intricate interplay of capital and race. Using historical-geographic materialist methodology, this paper argues that the immobilization and differential integration produced through externalization can serve as a spatial fix for acute labour shortages in so-called transit “migration” states. This differential integration disempowers the targeted migrant population and aggravates racial antagonisms. Hence, border externalisation is not just a (by-)product of racist ideology and policy, but also intensifies structural racial hierarchies in the space it intervenes into. Building on primary qualitative interview data, the paper studies this spatial intervention through the case of the “EU-Turkey Deal” and Turkey’s differentially integrated Syrian refugee population. On a theoretical level, the paper thereby contributes to the recent trend that reinserts the border into global processes of capital accumulation, imperialism, and racialized crisis management.
Every cook can plan: Governing the global polis
Troy Vettese
The enduring problems of socialist theory—alienation, planning, the state, and democracy—must be addressed jointly to achieve their resolution. An enduring sense of alienation in a socialist society would lead to problems of motivation and information, which make efficient planning difficult, if not impossible. In turn, planning that requires an increase in state power risks a despotism of the party or its bureaucrats. The solution, however, are not merely small-scale Ostromian commons or market socialism as these schemes cannot tackle large-scale problems and likely will degenerate into capitalism. In this paper, I will sketch what a global, democratic, and planned economy could look like. I draw on the works of CLR James, Otto Neurath, Janos Kornai, and Ellen Meiksins Wood, as well as survey the history of planning in Kerala and China, as well as direct democracy in ancient Athens.
Emergency environmentalism: Purpose, pleasure and politics in a catastrophic time
Ulrika Winter
As climate catastrophes are increasingly entering the present even in the Global North, environmental movements are shifting from narratives of avoiding catastrophe to handling ongoing ones. One expression of this is what I call ’emergency environmentalism’, most clearly represented by Extinction Rebellion’s (XR) declaration of ‘climate emergency’. However, mobilizing for collective action in an emergency is not without contradictions. Drawing on 10 interviews with Swedish XR and A22 activists, I explore their motivations in order to outline the potentials and pitfalls of a necessary ‘politics of catastrophe’. I show that fear experienced in relation to environmental disasters can dispose people to take collective action and that pleasurable emotions resulting from protest keep activists going despite bleak outlooks and low chance of success. However, the limited time slot for action implied in the emergency narrative raises in some activists the sensitive question of when it is time to give up. Through the case of emergency environmentalism, I argue that attention to emotions can provide a path for a viable politics of catastrophe, and that a stronger emphasis on class struggle provides a purpose for continuing the fight regardless of whether it is “too late”.
The transnationalization of the wind energy sector and the international fragmentation of the working class
William Westgard-Cruice
The structural power of the working class to effectively confront employers’ associations and capitalist states at wider geographical scales has been strongly shaped by workers’ capacities to establish control over the production and circulation of energy. This capacity is conditioned in large part by the geographies of energy production networks (Mitchell, 2011; Malm, 2016). The rapid growth of renewable energy industries thus poses new challenges for the organized working class. Although each renewable energy technology is materially and geographically distinct, there are some challenges that are common across the wind and solar sectors. The first is that the manufacturing process of renewable energy equipment is highly fragmented across international borders. The second is that the workers who design and manufacture the main components of wind and solar power plants are often spatially separated from those workers who install, operate, and maintain renewable energy systems (Franquesa, 2022). Our analysis of the offshore wind energy sector serves to illuminate these issues. For any given offshore wind farm, the wind turbine generators, blades, foundations, cables, substations, and other major components are produced in different sites by workers pitted against one another in a distinct form of “multi-scalar competitive fragmentation” (Hürtgen, 2021). In addition, the offshore wind energy sector is inheriting techniques of labor control from the offshore oil and gas and maritime transport industries, namely the use of Flag of Convenience (FOC) vessels and the segmentation of the global maritime workforce along lines of nationality, language, gender, and “race” (Campling & Colas, 2021).
Means of capitalist development: a Marxist political economy critique of the trade regime debate
Yannis Bougiatiotis
The question of free trade versus protectionism has long been the apple of discord between different schools of economic thought. The development of the free trade doctrine from classical political economy to neoclassical theory under neoliberalism progressed an array of arguments against protectionism and in favor of unrestricted international competition. On the other pole, originating predominately from underdeveloped economies, “early” and “late” antagonizers created a long legacy of protectionism that rejected the optimistic prescriptions of free trade and advocated instead for the necessity of protectionism for national development. Despite the differences between “free traders” and “protectionists” regarding the particular means, both sides have confined their positions to the narrow limits of capitalist development. Building upon that premise this paper provides a Marxist political economy critique of the debate by interrogating the class-biased implications of both free trade and protectionism. By extension, the critique of the existing debate invites further steps in reimagining development alternatives that are not necessarily confined to capitalism.
Danish Society for Marxist Studies 