Saturday 24 March 2012

Historical Materialism Ninth Annual Conference, London 2012

The Ninth Annual Historical Materialism Conference  will take place in Central London from 8-11 November 2012

Weighs Like a Nightmare
Historical Materialism Ninth Annual Conference

Has Marx been reanimated once again? From mainstream media to academia, this question hangs in the air. The old ghosts of revolution appear to be shaking off their shackles and getting agitated. What is this spirit? Who are the militants haunting this ramshackle capitalism? Are these new spectres - stalking the streets of Syria, Tunisia and Egypt, Athens, Spain and Wall Street and beyond - or direct descendants of socialist and communist ones? How does the past haunt the present? How might the present haunt the future?

As new conflicts and struggles emerge, the old questions refuse to go away: What type of organisation is needed to sharpen the conflicts, if any? Who are the agents of history and change? Is the scope of political action national or international? What is the political value of alliances and fronts? Does history cunningly work a progressive path through and around the contingencies of struggle? Are the same mistakes to be made, the same failures repeated?

The ninth HM annual conference focuses on the returns and the persistence of political forms and theoretical problems, on the uses and abuses of the history of Marxism in this turbulent present and on the ways and forms in which an inheritance of various Marxist traditions can help us to organise and to act in contemporary struggles.

HM London conference *provisional* programme online http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual9/HM2012Grid.pdf/view
  Please note: this will change over the next few weeks so please be sure to check the final version posted 24 hours before the start of the conference
Online registration for the HM conference now available! http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual9/register

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