CfP: CPGB 100 in Manchester

CPGB 100 Conference in Manchester

Call for papers

Call for Papers

Title: Workers of the world? The Communist Party of Great Britain as a global party

Dates: Friday 18 – Saturday 19 September 2020

Venue: People’s History Museum, Manchester

Organised by the CPGB Archives Trust and the journals Socialist History and Twentieth Century Communism and hosted by the People’s History Museum.

In the summer of 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed as the British section of the Communist International. Although the Comintern was dissolved in 1943, internationalism and the sense of belonging to a world movement would remain one of the defining characteristics of communist politics. Links with the USSR and communism’s ruling parties have proved an enduring source of interest and controversy for historians. At the same time, in recent years there has been a broadening out to other fields of transnational activism and association and the forms of political identity to which these gave rise. As increasingly attention turns to the writing of a global history of communism, historians of the party in Britain have been turning their minds to the multiple strands and histories of the CPGB can be located within it.

The People’s History Museum holds the archives of the CPGB and in making these publicly accessible has played a major role in stimulating a critical historiography of the communist movement in Britain. This conference will offer the opportunity to take stock of one of the key themes in this historiography on the centenary of the party’s foundation.

We are seeking papers of 5000 to 8000 words to be presented at the conference. Conference themes may include, but are not limited to:

⇒the CPGB as section of the world communist movement
⇒communists, the empire and anti-imperialism
⇒communists, the USSR and ‘actually existing socialism’
⇒transnational activism and solidarity networks
⇒delegations, study tours and political tourism
⇒Britain’s ‘Cominternians’
⇒emigres and political exiles in Britain
⇒communists, anti-fascism and the war in Spain
⇒Eurocommunism
⇒communists, maoism and the PRC
⇒culture wars, translations and publishing enterprises

For further details and updates please visit the conference website on https://cpgb100.wordpress.com. Proposals for papers and any enquiries should be submitted by e-mail to the organisers on cpgb100phm@gmail.com. The deadline for submitting proposals is Monday 30 March. We shall inform all applicants as to whether their proposals have been accepted as soon as possible after that date. The deadline for receiving completed papers from successful applicants will be Friday 2 September 2020. Selected papers will be published in the journal Socialist History.
The conference registration fee, which covers lunch and light refreshments, will be £15.
Contact Info:
Francis King, School of History, UEA, Norwich NR4 7TJ

https://cpgb100.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/

Rosa Luxemburg and 1905 (2005)

Rosa Luxemburg and 1905

Written By: David Renton
Date: January 2005

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 23: Lent 2005 

The London Socialist Historians Group organised a seminar at the recent European Social Forum in London. It was held on the Saturday morning, with about fifty people in the audience.

Our title was 'Rosa Luxemburg and 1905'. We wanted to encourage discussion about Luxemburg, because we feel that her history has been neglected in recent years. We also wanted to draw attention to 1905, as we are rapidly approaching the hundredth anniversary of this year of mass strikes in Russia, when Leon Trotsky first came to prominence, and when workers in St. Petersburg developed the workers' council, or Soviet.

Stefan Bornost from the German paper Linksruck spoke first. He described how Luxemburg arrived in Germany, as a refugee from Poland, and how she came to prominence in the movement. He talked about her anti-war politics, and her commitment to the goal of revolution.

The second panellist was Colin Barker, who concentrated on Luxemburg's pamphlet on 1905, The Mass Strike. He described it as a work of social movement theory, and a rare piece of research, written from the inside, arguing for more movements of this kind. Luxemburg's key insight, Barker argued, was to perceive that in really big mass movements, the traditional divide between political and class issues tended to break down. The alternative to the bureaucratism of parliamentary politics, Luxemburg suggested, was the spontaneous uprising of the crowd. In his concluding remarks, Barker asked whether Luxemburg had in fact been right? Should not the events of 1918-9 and Rosa's death be taken as evidence of a failed strategy?

The final speaker was Richard Greeman, from the Victor Serge Centre in Moscow. He responded to Barker's concluding remarks by arguing that 1905 should represent the truth of a different model - one based on spontaneous uprising, the network rather than the party. There had been many 1905s, Greeman argued, or movements like it, including 1936 in Spain, 1956 in Hungary, 1968.

The subsequent debate concerned the utility of 1905 as a model for present-day socialist or anti-capitalist practice – with some people in the audience arguing strongly for more diffuse structures of organisation, and other speakers arguing for a more centralised model. Probably the sharpest comment came from Ian Birchall of the London Socialist Historians Group, who observed that when historians talk about spontaneity they usually mean that they haven't yet found out who did the organising.

The Great Strike Twenty Years On (2004)

The Great Strike Twenty Years On

Written By: Keith Flett
Date: January 2004

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 20: Lent 2004  

On Saturday November 1st [2004] I, along with David Renton, Andrew Burgin, John Geoffrey Walker and Inga Bystram, organised an historical conference, sponsored by the London Socialist Historians Group, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1984-5 British miners strike.

Of course we knew that the anniversary itself is not until March 2004. However, we wanted to have a serious historical conference, before the cheering and booing starts next year.

Ironically it took place in the middle of the most militant piece of strike action since that time, the unofficial and illegal post workers action to defend their union and conditions of work. We collected over £100 for those workers, who unlike the miners, won.

The conference itself was well attended, with an excellent series of papers and a high quality of debate. It is hoped to publish the proceedings next year.

And yet, as the lead organiser, it was what we didn’t manage to pull off that struck me most. Many interesting things were said about the 1984-5 miners strike, and about miners struggles in general, not least by Vic Allen, the secretary of the left-wing Miners Forum which organised much militant action in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. But it was what was missing that suggested that there are real gaps in our history.

One senior labour historian who I discussed the conference with suggested that 20 years might be too soon to examine the history of the 1984-5 strike. The quality of the papers and the attendance at the conference suggests that this was not quite right. Yet, they may still have had a point.

At one level it is obvious that many of those who were in some way involved with the 1984-5 strike have gone on to other things. Some may have retired from active industrial and political engagement. Others may well still be engaged, perhaps as Labour Councillors or MPs. Either way, it is less than likely that they particularly want to remember their role in the strike- although they may well have some things to say about it- which, no doubt, we will hear at some stage in 2004.

It was specific areas of the strike that provoked the most yawning gaps. The original appeal for papers provided a wide-ranging response. Yet of this response, only one person asked (rather than offered a paper on) what we knew about ‘lesbians and gays support for the miners’ and no one at all volunteered a paper on women’s activity during the strike or the role of Women Against Pit Closures. It became clear at the conference that there is at least one current research project which is trying to look at this history, through contacting past activists. However that in itself underlines the point. There are not people out there ready to tell the story at the moment. When we got no responses we contacted a number of socialist-feminist activists who were known to have been involved with the strike. Interest was expressed, but no paper was forthcoming. We even went as far as commissioning a paper or two. They fell through.

A preliminary conclusion is that the move away from an association with socialist and working-class politics that has characterised some, although not all, recent women’s history has succeeded in making women’s involvement in the great strike something that is freshly hidden from history. Let’s hope that this is rectified in the months to come.

The second area where we struggled was that of memorabilia of the strike. Given the huge amount of leaflets, papers, posters, badges, records and much else associated with the strike we thought it would be useful to have a small exhibition at the end to show some of this. In the end thanks to the efforts of Andrew Burgin and Roni Margulies, we did succeed in doing this. At the same time it became clear that many of those who were known to have a considerable archive of memorabilia were rather reluctant to remember it.

The third area where we excited much less interest than expected was in the role of the State during the strike. Some films - such as Billy Elliot, shot in the Durham coalfield - have shown this. It was a huge concern at the time, and we received precisely no offers of papers about it twenty years on. Again, perhaps the memory remains too painful.

So the Conference was well worth doing and looks set to provoke further research and discussion. Yet, as Education Minister Charles Clarke told a seminar of the LSHG two days after the conference, the decline in interest in labour history is a major problem. Not least because labour history is such a large part of our recent history, despite what post-modernists and New Labourists may tell us. And if, as an industrial commentary in the current issue of Socialist Review suggests, twenty years on the 1984-5 miners strike still casts something of a shadow over the industrial landscape, then we do, urgently, need to come to terms with some preliminary conclusions about its history.

Conference report - Chartism Day (1999)

Conference report: Chartism Day 1999

Written By: Stephen Roberts
Date: October 1999

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 7: Autumn 1999  

The annual conference on Chartism took place this year in Dodford, near Bromsgrove, where the National Trust recently bought one of the Chartist cottages. The settlement was established by Feargus O’Connor 150 years ago and, as well as the conference on 10 July 1999, there were other celebrations, including the performance of a play entitled “O’Connor’s Dream”.

The conference was attended by a hundred and twenty people, among them researchers, local people and inhabitants of another Chartist settlement, Heronsgate, near Watford.

There were four papers. Peter Searby, who in 1968 first drew scholarly attention to the existence of Dodford, Malcolm Chase of the University of Leeds, and Hideo Koga, of Kyoto Women’s University in Japan, dealt with different aspects of the Land Plan. Tim Randall’s paper was concerned with the poetry and songs of Chartism, a subject he has recently written about in a new collection of essays, The Chartist Legacy (1999). At intervals during his paper Roy and Pat Palmer performed Chartist songs.

The day concluded with the unveiling of a commemorative stone by Simon Penn of Avoncroft museum of Historic Buildings, and a walk, in perfect weather, around the Chartist village.

In 2000 Chartism Day returns to the University of Birmingham; the precise date and details of papers will be made known early next year.

Letter - 1848 conference by Ian Birchall (1999)

Letter: 1848 conference

Written By: Ian Birchall
Date: January 1999

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 5: Lent 1999 

Keith Flett was not present for most of my paper at the Manchester 1848 conference (LSHGN No 4), and hence is not well-placed to report on it. It is a gross slur on my reputation as a Marxist historian to say that I claimed that “Marx and Engels’ view” of 1848 was “bad history”. The Eighteenth Brumaire will stand out as one of the great pieces of historical writing despite anything I may say about it.

I made the much more modest claim that Engels’ articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung under the title “The June Revolution” (CW, VII 157-94) were inaccurate history in that they falsely ascribed a centralising leadership to Kersaurie, whose true history I tried to reinstate. I also enquired why Eric Hobsbawm and his colleagues on the editorial commission of the Collected Works had connived in perpetuating this inaccuracy

Conference Report - Chartism Day (1999)

Conference report: Chartism Day

Written By: Stephen Roberts
Date: January 1999

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 5: Lent 1999 

Chartism Day 1998 took place at the University of Birmingham on September 12th. There were 30 people present. Papers were read by Paul Pickering on Feargus O’Connor and Ireland, by Joan Hugman on the Northern Liberator, and by Edward Royle on Chartism and Owenism.

Chartism Day 1999 takes place at Dodford, near Bromsgrove, on July 10th. Dodford was one of the Chartist land settlements, and the conference will tie in with the 150th anniversary of its location day. One of the Chartist cottages at Dodford was recently bought by the National Trust. Speakers will include Malcolm Chase and Peter Searby.

CfP: Engels in Eastbourne, University of Brighton

This event has now been postponed to June 2021 as a result of Covid-19.  

Call for Papers – Engels in Eastbourne

Conference to be held to mark Engels@200 at the University of Brighton, Eastbourne campus

 

Keynote speakers:

Tariq Ali, writer and filmmaker

Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol

28 November 2020 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Friedrich Engels, the German radical philosopher who in works such as The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), The Peasant War in Germany (1850), The Housing Question (1872), ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ (1876), Anti-Dühring (1877), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Dialectics of Nature (1883) and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) made pathbreaking and profound contributions to modern social and political theory.  As the co-thinker of Karl Marx and co-author of The Communist Manifesto and ‘The German Ideology’, he played a critical role in the forging and development of classical Marxism specifically.  But like Marx, Engels was ‘above all a revolutionary’, who also played a role in revolutionary upheavals such as the German Revolution of 1848 and in the international socialist movement. 

When Engels died in London on 5 August 1895, at the age of 74, his last wish was that following his cremation his ashes be scattered off Beachy Head, near Eastbourne.  Marx and Engels had visited many Victorian seaside resorts, such as Margate, Ramsgate and the Isle of Wight, but Eastbourne was Engels’s favourite place and where he holidayed for extended periods during the summers in later life.   Engels wrote to Sorge on 18 March 1893 for example that he had spent two weeks in Eastbourne and ‘had splendid weather’, coming back ‘very refreshed’.

As part of the wider commemorations planned for Engels@200, Engels in Eastbourne welcomes proposals for papers on any aspect of Engels’s life, work and intellectual and political legacy.  Themes may then include but are not restricted to the following:

- Engels’s relationship to Marx and Marxism

- Engels’s anti-colonialism and internationalism

- Engels’s understanding of the origins of women’s oppression

- Engels’s analysis of natural science and the natural world

- Engels’s understanding of religion

- Engels’s analysis of capitalism and working class and peasant struggles

- Engels’s concept of ‘social murder’

- Engels’s role in revolutionary movements and relationship to other revolutionaries

- Representations and commemorations of Engels

Our keynote speakers:  

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics, and seven novels (translated into over a dozen languages) as well as scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of New Left Review.

Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. He has degrees from Columbia University and the University of Oxford, and has held visiting appointments in the USA, Australia, Japan and China. He has published widely on Marx, Engels and Marxism, including Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought (being re-issued for a 30^th anniversary edition) and his current project is a short book Engels Before Marx coming out in late 2020 as a ‘Palgrave Pivot’.

Please send proposals for papers of up to 250 words to Cathy Bergin c.j.bergin@brighton.ac.uk or Christian Høgsbjerg c.hogsbjerg@brighton.ac.uk by 31 January 2020. 

Conference supported by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics and the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton

http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/mnh/centre-events/conferences/cmnh-conference-engels-in-eastbourne

https://www.brighton.ac.uk/cappe/index.aspx

http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/mnh

CFP - People's History?

People’s History? Radical Historiography and the Left in the Twentieth Century

Saturday and Sunday, 15 and 16 February 2020 at the School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK

Organised and hosted by UEA School of History in conjunction with the journal Socialist History and the Institute of Working Class History, Chicago.

History has always played a crucial role in the making of the modern left, both in Britain and around the world, providing a vital tool for theoretical rationale, social critique and direct action. Whilst offering an important source of intellectual stimulus, it has equally been the cause of hot debate, controversy and division, never more so than during the twentieth century. Over the course of those ten tumultuous decades, history became the ground upon which the left struggled to define and redefine itself in response to dramatically changing times. Critique was, and continues to be, all-encompassing, from debates on historical interpretation, method, pedagogy and application, to questions addressing the very nature – or possibility – of historical knowledge itself.

This conference seeks to explore all aspects of the status and uses of history in modern left imagination.

We are seeking papers of 5000 to 10000 words to be presented at the conference. Conference themes may include, but are not limited to: 

• History, Marxism and international socialism
• History, class and class consciousness
• History, philosophy and critical theory
• History, gender, race, sexuality
• History and (post)colonialism
• History and/as activism
• History, pedagogy and empowerment
• National and international histories
• Party histories
• History and the role of the historian as public intellectual

Proposals for papers and any enquiries should be submitted here. The deadline for submitting proposals is Friday 29 November 2019. We shall inform all applicants as to whether their proposals have been accepted as soon as possible after that date. The deadline for receiving completed papers from successful applicants will be Monday 3 February 2020. Selected papers will be published in a special issue of the journal Socialist History. Attendance at the conference for both presenters and audience will be free of charge, but we ask that anyone wishing to attend registers in advance.

https://shspeopleshistory.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/

Conferences - Marxism 2019 / CfP Historical Materialism 2019

Marxism 2019 - A festival of socialist ideas - 4-7 July, London 

 Capitalism is in crisis. Society is rapidly polarising between Left and Right. Marxism Festival 2019 is the place to debate how we can beat back the rise of racism, fascism and the far right. But thousands of people from around the world will also be discussing the alternative to the system that means chaos.

 Speakers include:
Omar Barghouti • Extinction Rebellion  • Ilan Pappé • Louise Raw  • Ian Angus and more!


For more information and how to book see here

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Historical Materialism Sixteenth Annual London Conference 2019

Claps of Thunder: Disaster Communism, Extinction Capitalism and How to Survive Tomorrow

Central London, 7-10 November 2019

https://conference.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/hmlondon/annual16

Call for Papers, Deadline 15 May 2019

For all queries, email only please: historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.uk

Humanity faces an unprecedented crisis in the conditions for its long-term survival. The planet has warmed before, but never this fast. Mass extinction is a regular geological event, but it is now happening faster than at any time since the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction: a megaphase crisis in microphase time. And humanity has never before faced the comprehensive exhaustion of top-soil fecundity.

The emerging forms of authoritarian reaction are characteristically denialist about this catastrophe, from Trump’s Sinophobic conspiracism to Bolsonaro’s efforts to extirpate the landless workers’ movement. But the dominant response of fossil fuel giants is that of the majority of capitalist sectors and liberal states: to embrace ‘green’ capitalism, carbon markets, carbon taxes, and green technologies, whose total effect is to lock in carbon emissions. The Pentagon positions itself as an ally against climate change while securing the conditions for the efficient exploitation of oil and gas concealed under thawing Arctic ice. Environmental movements have coalesced and dispersed since the Seventies, but have hitherto lacked the structural, disruptive capacity, and perhaps also the strategy, to achieve the depth and scale of social transformation necessary to slam on the brakes of the crisis.

The roots of this ongoing disaster are social. The very evolution of fossil fuel use is linked a growth paradigm based upon the imperatives of capitalist accumulation ever since the beginning of the ‘industrial revolution.’ Advocates of ‘green capitalism’ have failed to offer a plausible solution to a catastrophe that is more imminent than ever. Any attempt to avert climate change requires a mobilisation of resources and a profound change in production and consumption forms that are incompatible with capitalist social relations of production. But even if such an attempt is launched tomorrow, we are likely to face a long-lasting legacy of damages to the earth system

How does communism fare in a world thus despoiled? What alternatives to the various miserable endgames mapped out for us by capital can Marxists envision? What new configurations of agency, strategy and vision are necessary for human emancipation and survival? Beyond denialism, how do we avert the potential for new climate-driven security regimes, eco-Malthusian crackdowns on the poor, and murderous eco-fascism?

This is the overarching theme for this year’s Historical Materialism Conference. We welcome papers on:

• Relationships between climate change, mass extinction and capitalism, and the consequences of ecological deterioration for the long-term reproduction of capitalism, the organisation of capitalist states, the viability of capitalist democracy, and new axes of imperialism.

• Potential for new modalities of racial capitalism, or a new form of ‘climate sovereign’ or ‘climate Leviathan’, to emerge around the militarisation of climate policy under the rubric of ‘natural security’.

• Commodification of climate change, as for example with the pursuit of carbon markets, ‘green capitalist’ technologies, and the opening of the Transpolar Sea Route and the military struggles for control over it.

• History of environmental struggles, from Bhopal to the Dakota Access Pipeline, the sometimes ambiguous role of the organised working-class therein, the salience of anti-racist and anti-colonial movements, and the ideological contest between various registers of ecological thought including eco-socialism, eco-Malthusianism, Deep Ecology, black ecology, the environmentalism of the poor, and eco-fascism.

• Popular militancy, denial, apathy, anger and ‘melancholia’ in the face of climate crisis, and the ideological or psychoanalytic bases thereof.

• Emerging forms of climate reaction, from libertarian strategies of denial/affirmation, to eco-fascist Arcadias based on racist genocide.

• Ecological and political viability of strategies of mitigation — from Green New Deals to geoengineering to ‘half-earth’ strategies — and the meaning of any plausible scenario of communist plenty in a de-carbonised future.

• The recent ecological reformulations of historical materialism, the relevance of Marxist categories for analysing the geological scales of ‘Deep Time’ on which the climate crisis is predicated, and the relationship between Marxism and the ‘hard sciences’.

The conference will also include streams on Marxist Feminism, Race and Capitalism, Work, and Sexuality and Political Economy (all to follow), but also open CfPs for paper/panel proposals that look at utopia and postcapitalist futures, the political struggles over sovereignty, the second wave of Arab uprisings and the capitalocene, Marxism and literature. In addition, the conference will, as always, be open to proposals not directly related to the main theme on all areas of Marxist and left-wing thought and politics, including political economy, political science and state theory, history and historiography, philosophy, law, cultural and aesthetic theory, science studies, and any other relevant discipline.

Please Note: Although we welcome preconstituted panels, after extensive feedback from previous years we are tightening up on panels with just titles or incomplete names. Panels should provide title, abstract and full names, emails of each participant and abstract/note of contribution (where relevant). Incomplete panel proposals will be put on the reserve list and may ultimately be rejected. We also reserve the right to reject certain papers in a preconstituted panel and to reconstitute panels as we see fit.

Conference - The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity - University of Brighton, 27-29 June

The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity 

University of Brighton, UK 

An international interdisciplinary conference jointly organized by the University of Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE); Centre for Design History (CDH) and Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories (CMNH); with additional support from Radical Futures.

(https://shop.brighton.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/arts-humanities/academic-conferences/radical-sixties-aesthetics-politics-and-histories-of-solidarity) 

Please manually copy and paste the link into your browser should it not work

Opening public roundtable on Thursday 27 June 2019 at 5:00 pm

Speakers:

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, S.T.E.P. 

Karma Nabulsi, University of Oxford.

Conference days: Friday 28 and Saturday 29 June 

Keynote speakers:

Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

Cynthia Young, Pennsylvania State University.

This conference seeks to decentre the established loci of “The Sixties”. It builds on recent efforts to expand and complicate the spatiality and temporality of the global sixties and calls for new analyses of this critical historical conjuncture from the standpoint of solidarity. 

How was solidarity conceived, imagined and radically enacted in the border-crossings, both spatial and intellectual, of new revolutionaries in the “long” 1960s? How did it constitute a nodal theme for radical politics on the left? What are its intellectual frameworks and transnational politics, associated aesthetics and cultures of circulation. 

With 60 international speakers, discussions will explore notions and manifestations of solidarity as articulated in the interstices that, more than 50 years ago, opened up shared spaces of political struggle and prefigured radical horizons of possibility. Papers will expand on histories of the radical sixties to include: Chile, China, Cuba, Egypt, Finland, Greece, Guinea Bissau, Hungary, India, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, Northern Ireland, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Portugal, South Africa, USA, UK, and Uruguay, among other translocal connections.

• For further information, registration and conference updates, please visit:

CAPPE http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/cappe

CDH http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/centre-for-design-history-research

CMNH http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/cmnh

• For all general enquiries, please contact: Radical60s@brighton.ac.uk or i.a.sinclair@brighton.ac.uk

Organizing Committee

Zeina Maasri (convener); Cathy Bergin; Francesca Burke; Andrea Garcia Gonzalez; Garikoitz Gomez Alfaro; Megha Rajguru.

CfP: Uneven and combined development for the 21st century

UNEVEN AND COMBINED DEVELOPMENT FOR THE 21ST CENTURY:

A CONFERENCE

UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW, 5-7 SEPTEMBER 2019

Hosted by the University of Glasgow's Socialist Theory and Movements
Research Network in association with Historical Materialism

As recently as the early 1990s, anyone predicting that Trotsky's 'law' of
uneven and combined development (UCD) would soon become a key theoretical
reference point across several academic disciplines would have been treated
with a great deal of scepticism. Yet, less than three decades later, UCD is
regularly deployed in the fields of international relations, historical
sociology, political economy, social geography and–perhaps most
surprisingly–world literature. Not since the vogue for Gramsci's notion of
hegemony in the 1970s and 1980s has a concept from the classical Marxist
tradition enjoyed such widespread academic diffusion. Controversies have of
course abounded: adherents have disagreed over whether UCD is a
trans-historic or trans-modal process, or whether it is one which can only be
found in the era of industrial capitalism; critics have alleged that UCD is
simply a more sophisticated form of Eurocentrism; Trotskyist activists have
complained–with some justification–that UCD has been detached from the
political context in which it was first deployed. There have been some
events focusing on specific aspects of UCD, notably one on culture at the
University of Warwick in 2014; yet, in spite of the rapidly multiplying
literature there has not been an international event bringing together
representatives from all the relevant areas of scholarship to engage in
inter-disciplinary discussion.

This conference will finally provide such an opportunity. Although its main
focus will be on UCD, it will also be open to discussion of two important
related topics, the earlier theory of /uneven development/ and the strategy
of /permanent revolution/, the conditions for which UCD was of course
originally intended to explain. The organisers are pleased to announce that
keynote addresses will be given by Robert Brenner (on uneven development
in the history of capitalism) and Justin Rosenberg (on the relevance of UCD
to understanding contemporary issues like Brexit and the rise of Trump):
other keynote speakers will be announced over the coming months.

The event is being organised by members of the University of
Glasgow's Socialist Theory and Movements Research Network–Neil Davidson
(School of Social and Political Sciences), David Featherstone (School of
Geographical and Earth Sciences) and Vassiliki Kolocotroni (School of
Critical Studies)–in association with Historical Materialism (HM). We
are delighted at the involvement of HM, as the journal has been involved the
debates over UCD–most recently in the symposium on Alexander Anievas and
Kerem Nişancıoğlu's, /How the West Came to Rule/ in issue 26, 3 (2018),
and in the HM book series which includes such pertinent works as Day and
Gaido's collection of primary texts, /Witnesses to Permanent
Revolution/ (2009) and Christie and Degirmencioglu's forthcoming /Cultures
of Uneven and Combined Development/ (2019).

We are inviting academics, public intellectuals and political activists
interested in the debates over UCD and related areas–including those who
are critical of the concept, or at least sceptical of its explanatory
power–to participate in the conference. If you simply want to attend and
take part in the discussion, you can complete the on-line registration form
which will be issued in June. But if you are planning to submit a paper,
please send it to me at Glasgow (i.e.neil.davidson@glasgow.ac.uk [1]) by the
deadline for proposals of 10 May. You should aim for a maximum of 250 words
for individual papers and of 500 words for panels: panels should not involve
more than three speakers. These proposals don't have to be formal
'abstracts'–we just want to know what you would like to talk about for
scheduling purposes. We're not going to insist that proposals fit into
pre-decided 'streams': we'll instead see what subject areas participants want
to discuss and work from there. The subjects of papers/panels could be
anything from case-studies of UCD in particular nation-states or regions, to
the contemporary relevance of permanent revolution, to the impact of UCD on
the emergence of Modernism–the only criteria for the acceptance of
proposals is that they engage with the themes of the conference and have
something interesting to say about them. We're as open to the extension of
existing arguments as we are in the unveiling of new positions. In
particular, if you are PhD student working on UCD-related themes but have not
yet published, this would provide you with an opportunity to present in an
interested and supportive environment. Unfortunately, we can only pay for
keynote speakers to attend, but the cost of registration will be relatively
low: £20 (employed f/t)/£10 (student, employed p/t, unemployed or retired).

Finally, there are good reasons, one related to its subject, for holding this
conference in Glasgow. We are on the eve of the bicentenary of the Scottish
general strike of 1820–the first such event in history and one generated in
part by Scotland's own experience of UCD from the late 18th century onwards.
Moreover, and bringing things right up to date, it's not clear what impact
Brexit will have on the Scottish independence movement, but it is conceivable
that a new campaign might have begun by then. Non-Scottish participants will
at any rate be visiting Scotland in 'interesting times'!

We'll provide information on the venues, accommodation, restaurants, travel,
etc. when formal registration begins.  

[1] mailto:neil.davidson@glasgow.ac.uk