2020 marks the centenary of the foundation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx’s lifelong collaborator, Friedrich Engels. And of course, anniversaries means conferences. The University of Brighton are hosting a conference on Engels in Eastbourne on 23 and 24 June 2020. Later on this year, on 18 and 19 September 2020, the People’s History Museum in Manchester is hosting a conference, in conjunction with Socialist History, Twentieth Century Communism and the CPGB Archive Trust, on Workers of the world? The Communist Party of Great Britain as a global party. A call for papers for the CPGB conference has been launched.
Archive for the 'call for papers' Category
02
Mar
20
anniversaries, conferences…
There is now a special WordPress site for this event: echoesofrevolution.wordpress.com, where the latest information about this event will be posted.
As the old European powers approached exhaustion in the Great War, a wave of revolutionary struggles broke out across the continent, from Ireland to Russia. Mass movements articulated class, social and national aspirations as states fragmented and empires, dynasties and rulers were toppled. But relations between these movements and their component parts were anything but simple. National claimants contested for control of disputed territories in the name of self-determination. Class and social movements struggled with one another over who should rule in the successor states, and in whose interests. These struggles left a lasting legacy which helped shape European politics for decades.
As a pivotal year in European history, 1918 begs comparison with other pivotal years, in particular 1848, in which many similar social and national aspirations came to the fore. This conference will look at and compare movements for radical social and political change of those revolutionary years. We are seeking papers of 5000 to 10000 words to be presented at the conference on any aspects of revolution, nationalism and socialism anywhere around the world during, around or across the years 1848 and 1918. Selected papers will be published in a special issue of the journal Socialist History. Attendance at the conference will be free of charge, but we ask that anyone wishing to attend registers in advance. Proposals for papers and any enquiries should be submitted to Francis King. E-mail: f.king@uea.ac.uk
Dates: Saturday and Sunday, 17 and 18 February 2018
Venue: 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.
Deadline for proposals for papers: 15 December 2017
Call for Papers
Wars of Position: Marxism and Civil Society
International Conference, Manchester, UK, 8-10 June 2017
Key-note speakers
Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York. Author of books including Crowds and Party (2016), The Communist Horizon (2011), Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies (2009)
Stathis Kouvelakis, Reader in Political Theory, King’s College, London and former member of Syriza’s Central Committee. Author of Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx (2003)
Kevin Morgan, Professor of Politics and Contemporary History, University of Manchester. Author of books including Bolshevism, Syndicalism and the General Strike: The Lost Internationalist World of A.A. Purcell (2013), Labour Legends and Russian Gold (2006), The Webbs and Soviet Communism (2006).
‘In Russia’, wrote Antonio Gramsci, ‘the State was everything’ and ‘civil society primordial’; in the highly-developed West, civil society formed ‘permanent fortifications’ which the revolutionary party would have to occupy and transform in order to take and hold power.
No Marxist parties in the West made a revolution. Historical analysis of their failure has been abundant, but insufficiently attentive to parties’ approaches to civil society in Gramsci’s sense (i.e. social practices and institutions outside the government, judiciary and repressive state apparatus). This international and interdisciplinary conference is at once historically grounded and attuned to contemporary debates on the Left. It brings together: analysis of the theory and practice of twentieth-century Marxist parties in relation to civil society; analysis of contemporary Left formations’ approaches to civil society; analysis of the ‘idea’ of communism today and the relevance or obsolescence of ‘the party’ as an organizational form in the twenty-first century.
Proposals are invited for twenty-minute papers and panels of three papers. Abstracts (250 words) should be emailed to warsofposition2017@manchester.ac.uk by 1/12/16. Conference interpreters may be available for delegates who wish to present in languages other than English (please e-mail the organisers). The conference will take place in Manchester’s People’s History Museum, an institution committed to archiving and chronicling the history of radical politics; some panels will discuss the challenges faced by such institutions today. Papers for the conference might address, but are not restricted to:
- History, civil society and the ‘idea of Communism’ debate (Badiou, Žižek, Dean et al)
- Civil society and political strategy in recent / contemporary Left formations (e.g. Podemos, Syriza, Five Star Movement, Die Linke, Parti de gauche)
- Theoretical debates in the Marxist tradition on ‘civil society’ (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukács, Althusser, Marcuse, Poulantzas et al)
- The struggle for ‘proletarian culture’ in the 1920s and after
- Communism, the nation and the Popular Fronts in the 1930s and 1940s
- New Lefts and communism
- ‘Anti-revisionism’ and cultural revolution
- Eurocommunism and civil society
- ‘Post-Marxism’
- Marxism, gender and the family
- Marxist parties and intellectuals/ education / science / religion / writing history/ the media / the family
- Marxism and the arts / the avant-garde / popular culture
- Marxist parties and their cultural institutions, publishing houses, publications and counter-hegemonic events
The conference is part of the AHRC-funded project, Wars of Position: Communism and Civil Society led by Dr Ben Harker at the University of Manchester:
http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/english/research/projects/wars-of-position/
It is run in collaboration with the People’s History Museum and the journal Twentieth Century Communism. The organisers intend to publish an edited collection based around the conference proceedings.
Day-school, 9th June 2016. Manchester
‘I am not ready to join the party’, wrote the novelist Harold Heslop to leading CPGB party theoretician, Rajani Palme Dutt in 1936, recognising the forbidding level of activism expected. The mandatory Communist hyper-commitment repelled potential recruits and actual members alike, especially in the early years. But others who joined the party then and later found through Communist commitment a meaningful way of life and a framework for understanding the world.
Bringing together academics from a wide range of disciplines and former party activists, this day-school analyses the complexities of commitment in the British Communist Party over its seventy-year history (1920-1991). Papers (20 minutes) might cover, but aren’t restricted to:
• The motivations and trajectories of party ‘hardliners’ who dutifully observed party discipline and the party line, regardless of misgivings;
• Communism as a way of life;
• Expulsion and the fear of it;
• Autobiographies written by former Communists;
• Figures who struggled to reconcile vocational, professional or artistic commitments with their Communism;
• ‘Loyal dissidents’ who remained fundamentally committed to the party while often challenging and seeking to enlarge its assumptions, procedures and priorities;
• Those who challenged what they saw as dominant party perceptions that ‘race’, gender and sexuality were secondary to class as sites of oppression;
• Activists who considered their ultimate commitment as being to Communist principles from which they believed the party to have deviated, and who challenged the party on those grounds;
• Those who transferred their abiding Marxist commitments to different currents or organisations—Trotskyist, New Left, Maoist—and the complex relations with the CPGB that followed.
Part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Wars of Position: Communism and Civil Society’, the day-school will be held in the Reading Room of the Labour History Archive and Study Centre in the People’s History Museum, Manchester, and will include a tour of the CPGB archive holdings. It will mark the opening to researchers of a new tranche of significant CP archive material relating primarily to the 1950-91 period (the papers of John Attfield, Monty Johnstone and Paul Olive). The event will conclude with a round-table discussion about Communism, commitment and the archive chaired by Professor Kevin Morgan and featuring Francis King (historian, former CP activist and archivist, editor of Socialist History), and John Attfield (historian and former secretary of the Communist Party History Group).
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be e-mailed to Ben Harker (ben.harker@manchester.ac.uk) by 1/4/16
The first decades of the 21st century have seen two worrying developments for anyone concerned with opposing oppression:
the continuing mutation and expansion of racism into new ‘cultural’ forms, above all in the form of a virulent Islamophobia; and
the electoral consolidation of parties of the far-right, who are not always fascist, but committed to deeply reactionary positions on most social issues, above all in relation to migration.
These two developments are distinct, but overlapping. On the one hand, racism is more widespread than on the far right, institutionally embedded over centuries in even the most notionally liberal states and exerting an influence even in the labour and trade union movement which might be thought to have most to lose from the divisions which it engenders. On the other hand, the far-right almost always includes racism among its repertoire of mobilising issues, but has politics which extend beyond it.
The plenaries and workshop sessions will interrogate:
racism in all its multifarious forms;
the new far-right of the neoliberal era (i.e. mid-1970s onwards), in both its fascist and non-fascist aspects, particularly its growing electoral impact; and
how the different varieties of racism and the far right can be challenged on the ground, and by whom.
Although our focus is international, no conference held in Scotland during September 2014 can avoid the fact of the independence referendum. While the national question is not our subject, any discussion of racism inevitably has to deal with its role in national formation, particularly in the case of the imperial powers of which Britain was once so preeminent. Themes which we hope to address in relation to Scotland are the reality (or otherwise) of claims that it suffers less from racism than England or other areas in Western Europe, and the reasons why, to date, it has remained relatively immune to the electoral appeal of the far-right.
Themes which the conference might address can include, but need not be restricted to the following:
Racism
Racism, class and globalised capitalism
Racism and neoliberalism
State racisms, in particular the racialization of migration and asylum
Anti-Muslim racism and the appropriation and mobilization of feminist discourses
Racism and the ‘white’ working class
Forms of anti-racist activism: from social movements to the everyday
Theorizing contemporary racisms – Feminist, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial and Neo-Marxist perspectives are particularly welcomed.
The legacy of anti-Irish racism in Scotland
Scots, the Empire and the externalisation of racism
Different attitudes to immigration in Scotland and England
The Far Right
The changing class basis of far right party membership
Distinguishing the ‘non-fascist’ far-right from fascism
Tensions between neoliberalism and far-right policy (the Tea Party, UKIP, etc.)
The far-right and the different phases of capitalist development
Working class electoral support for far-right parties
Campaigning against the far-right
Scottish Loyalism and far-right politics in Scotland
Why is the far-right weaker in Scotland than England?
We invite proposals for individual papers or panels from both established academics and postgraduate students, but also from those involved in addressing racism on a practical basis in advocacy groups, community campaigns, anti-racist mobilisations and trade unions.
Proposals should be no longer than 250 words and submitted to both organisers:
neil.davidson@glasgow.ac.uk and satnam.virdee@glasgow.ac.uk
by 16 May 2014
We are grateful to the Centre for Dynamics on Ethnicity (CoDE) and Sociology at the University of Glasgow for providing financial support for the organization of the conference.
Conference: “Workers’ Internationalism before 1914”
15-16 February 2014, School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK
Call for papers
2014 is the 150th anniversary of the foundation of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864. It is also the 125th anniversary of the foundation of the Socialist International in 1889, and the centenary of the outbreak of the war which precipitated the collapse of that International.
To mark these anniversaries, UEA School of History, in conjunction with the journal Socialist History and the Institute of Working Class History (Chicago) are organising a conference on “Workers’ internationalism before 1914”. We are inviting proposals for papers on any aspect of the subject.
Themes might include:
• the historical experience of the internationals and their affiliated organisations
• cross-border labour organisation
• resistance to nationalist politics in multi-national states
• transnational and international solidarity
• migration and the transplantation of labour movement culture
• international causes celèbres
• political asylum and revolutionary exile
• speaking tours of socialist leaders
We are seeking papers of 5000 to 10000 words on various experiences or aspects of workers’ internationalism before 1914, to be presented at the seminar. Selected papers will be published in 2014 in a special issue of Socialist History devoted to the subject.
Enquiries and proposals for papers should be submitted by 1 October 2013 to internationalism1914@gmail.com. Attendance at the conference will be free of charge.
socialist history news 