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!

Class and Its Dis/Contents

Ninth annual conference of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies

University of Copenhagen, Denmark
4-5 October 2024

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.