eighth historical materialism annual conference

Spaces of Capital, Moments of Struggle

The ongoing popular uprisings in the Arab world, alongside intimations of a resurgence in workers' struggles against 'austerity' in the North and myriad forms of resistance against exploitation and dispossession across the globe make it imperative for Marxists and leftists to reflect critically on the meaning of
collective anticapitalist action in the present.
Over the past decade, many Marxist concepts and debates have come in from the cold. The anticapitalist movement generated a widely circulating
critique of capitalist modes of international 'development'. More recently, the economic crisis that began in 2008 has led to mainstream-recognition of Marx as an analyst of capital.
The eighth annual Historical Materialism conference will strive to take stock of these shifts in the intellectual landscape of the Left in the context of the
social and political struggles of the present. Rather than resting content with the compartmentalisation and specialisation of various 'left turns' in theory and
practice, we envisage the conference as a space for the collective, if necessary, agonistic but comradely, reconstitution of a strategic conception of the mediations between socio-economic transformations and emancipatory politics.

FRIDAY F – 16.15-18.00,
B104

Conference: Popular Power in Latin America

- Chair: Jeffery Webber
- Leandro Vergara-Camus – The Legacy ofSocial Conflicts over Property Rights in Rural Brazil and Mexico Current Land
Struggles in Historical Perspective
- Dario Azzellini - Popular Power Inside,outside, With and Against the State: The Contradictory Path of the Bolivarian Process in Venezuela
- Franck Gaudichaud – Revolutionary Urban Spaces: Popular Power and Workersʼ Struggle in Santiago under the Allende government (1970-73)

SATURDAY I – 14.00-16.00
B104
Ours to Master and to Own.
Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present
(book launch and debate)

- Chair: Gregory Schwartz
- Dario Azzellini
- Sheila Cohen
- Alan Tuckman
- Marina Sitrin

SATURDAY J (cont.) – 16.15-18.00
445

Conference: Left Critique from the Andes to Mexico
- Chair: Gonzalo Pozo Martin
- Jeffery Webber – 'The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same': Capitalist Continuities and Indigenous-Left Resistance in Correa's Ecuador
- Abelardo Marina-Flores – Crisis and Resistance in Mexico Today: Socialism or Barbarism (once again)
- Dario Azzellini – Critiques and Contradictions Inside the Bolivarian Process: The Example of the Basic Industries and Workersʼ Control
- Valerio Arcary – Notes for a Historical Interpretation of the Trajectory of the Brazilian Workersʼ Party

Full programm overview under http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/8annual/HM2011Grid.pdf/...