The conjuncture
We live in a world marked by genocide, imperialist aggression, the ascent of the Far Right, and renewed forms of fascism. These developments come after a history of capitalist restructuring, strategic defeats of the Left, and social movements that have not been translated into emancipatory alternatives.
The neoliberal offensive that gathered force from the 1970s onwards sought to restore profitability by raising the rate of exploitation. It combined technological and organisational change with the intensification of work, downward pressure on wages, and attacks on collective rights and the social wage. The postwar welfare state was increasingly treated as an obstacle to accumulation.
The economic crisis of 2007–08 aftermath profoundly unsettled this already weakened balance of forces. Anti-austerity uprisings revived debates about rupture, reform, and the state. However, the political forces that emerged in opposition to neoliberalism often ended up administering its imperatives. This deepened the crisis of left strategy, and eroded the organisational and political capacities that had sustained earlier cycles of mobilisation.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed further contradictions of capitalist governance. Its unequal and authoritarian management reproduced divisions along lines of class, race, gender, and age, as well as inequalities within the international order. It also revealed the strategic weakness of the radical Left in articulating an autonomous response centred on workers, precarious groups, and the oppressed, a response that would have confronted the class relations shaping exposure, protection, employment, housing, and access to care, challenging authoritarian crisis management and, in the aftermath of the pandemic, drawing social and strategic lessons from the crisis rather than proceeding as though it had never happened.
These crises did not eliminate social antagonism; they transformed its terrain. The fragmentation of collective organisations and the absence of alternatives have coincided with the growing assertiveness of the most aggressive fractions of capital. Far-Right and neo-Fascist forces have capitalised on insecurity, disillusionment, and the crisis of political representation, offering exclusionary nationalism, racism, and patriarchal restoration as responses to the contradictions of capitalism. They have gained electoral strength, entered governments, and shifted the political agenda even when not in office. Their advance intersects with the increasing political influence of corporate technology oligarchs and their authoritarian projects. Trump’s administration offers a stark expression of these tendencies, combining openly reactionary rhetoric with an imperialist and militaristic agenda increasingly impatient with institutional constraints. The normalisation of attacks on migrants, workers, and feminist, queer, and trans struggles across the globe highlights a deeper authoritarian transformation of capitalist rule.
The genocide in Gaza, rooted in a long history of dispossession, occupation, and settler colonialism, is among the most devastating expressions of the violence of this conjuncture. It also marks the most aggressive phase yet of the Zionist project and the pursuit of a ‘Greater Israel’, expressed through Israel’s wars against Lebanon and Iran and its wider military offensive across the region, backed by the United States and other western powers. The proliferation of wars and threats of war, from West Asia to Ukraine, raises urgent questions about the instability of US hegemony and the contradictions of an increasingly multipolar international order. Military expenditure, debt, sanctions, border enforcement, and attacks on dissent reshape the everyday conditions of work and social reproduction, transferring the costs of geopolitical competition onto the exploited and oppressed.
And yet resistance persists. Workers are organising in sectors long considered impossible to unionise, from digital platforms and major technology firms to logistics and global shipping networks. Palestinian resistance in Gaza and the West Bank persists, while an international movement of solidarity has challenged complicity in genocide through demonstrations, campus occupations, workplace action, and initiatives to break the siege of Gaza. Waves of mass mobilisation —from France and Spain to Albania and Italy— have revealed the political potential of younger generations, including working-class, migrant, and refugee youth whose experiences cannot be captured by the familiar image of student protest alone. Such movements compel us to reconsider where contemporary political agency is formed, how diverse experiences of exploitation and dispossession become collective demands, and what forms of solidarity can endure beyond particular moments of mobilisation.
The central problem, therefore, is not the absence of resistance. It is the unresolved relationship between resistance, political organisation, and transformative strategy. How can dispersed struggles develop durable capacities, confront capital’s offensive, and move beyond defensive mobilisation? How can they construct forms of political agency capable of challenging the power of the capitalist state and articulating a different social order?
What can Marxism contribute?
Marxism has a rich history of theoretical innovation and political experimentation: from the Bolshevik Revolution and the development of revolutionary parties to the anti-fascist struggles of the 1940s, the great anti-colonial movements, diverse projects of socialist construction, and the mass communist parties and workers’ organisations of the postwar era. But the historical conditions within which these strategies emerged have changed. The task is neither to discard this inheritance nor to treat it as a ready-made blueprint. It is to examine its tensions, limits, and unrealised revolutionary potential.
We therefore invite discussion around a set of interconnected questions.
How should we understand the composition of the contemporary working class, its conditions of life and work, and its political and cultural experiences? Industrial production remains fundamental, but labour is also dispersed across services, care, agriculture, logistics, platforms, and fragmented chains of subcontracting. What forms of workplace organisation, unionism, and political representation can overcome this fragmentation? How do migration, racialisation, gender, and social reproduction shape class formation and the possibilities of solidarity?
How should historical materialism stand against genocide and colonial violence as both continuities and transformations of imperial rule? What does the destruction of Gaza reveal about settler colonialism, international law, and the complicity of imperial powers? How should we understand the wars and confrontations across West Asia; the war in Ukraine, which has become a central arena of confrontation between Russia and the collective West; the suffocating blockade imposed on Cuba; and the threats and interventions across Latin America, most starkly the US military operation in Venezuela? How are these developments related to the reshaping of global power amid China’s rise? How should we understand the strategic defeat of the US–Israeli attempt to subjugate Iran, as Iranian strikes on US bases across West Asia, the disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and Ansar Allah’s attacks on Red Sea shipping expose the limits of US imperial power? Above all, how should we understand the persistence of Palestinian resistance in Gaza, which, despite the immense human cost, continues to frustrate some of the most ruthless plans of imperial domination?
How can we theorise the increasingly direct entanglement of economic and political power? When technology oligarchs seek to shape state policy and the future of artificial intelligence, what changes—and what remains familiar—in the relationship between capital and the state? How are algorithmic management, surveillance, automation, and the control of information reorganising labour, ideology, and political power? What forms of collective control over technology might challenge its subordination to profit?
How do racism, patriarchy, and attacks on feminist, queer, and trans struggles enable political domination, social fragmentation, and exploitation? How are the policing of borders, the erosion of rights, and the devaluation of reproductive labour connected to the restructuring of class relations? What would it mean to build forms of unity of the exploited and oppressed against capitalism?
Where does capital seek new sources of profitability amid stagnation and crisis—through militarisation, extractivism, technological restructuring, the commodification of care, or the appropriation of nature? How do these processes intensify ecological breakdown and lead to the current unfolding climate disaster? What can ecological struggles, movements against dispossession, and workers’ organising learn from one another?
Above all, how might the political vacuum left by recent defeats be filled by forces genuinely antagonistic to bourgeois strategy? What can be learned from the limits of governmental left projects, from new forms of collective action, and from attempts to build a renewed oppositional pole in France and elsewhere? What relations between movements, parties, unions, and state power might make a transformative strategy possible? What, in short, have we learned from the crises of the past two decades—and what remains to be learned?
Gramsci, ninety years on
‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ This is how Antonio Gramsci attempted to describe in the summer of 1930, already a prisoner of Italian Fascism since 1926, his sense of a broader social and political crisis that had yet to be resolved. This was Gramsci’s comprehension of the dynamics and explosive contradictions of his era, but it seems even more pertinent today, 90 years after his passing, in a world marked by climate disaster, war, genocide and the rise of neofascism. Yet naming the morbid symptoms is not enough. How can we rebuild the movements that will successfully challenge the barbarism of contemporary capitalism and imperialism? How can we transform anger and discontent into actual analysis and strategy, so that, as Gramsci says, ‘feeling-passion becomes understanding and hence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive)’? How can collective experience turn into the kind of political knowledge and how can movements build the organisational capacities to confront capitalist and imperial power, rather than simply endure its violence?
Gramsci famously invoked a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will. We propose, deliberately, an optimism of the intellect: not complacency about the balance of forces, but confidence in our collective capacity to understand the ‘great and terrible world’ we inhabit, to identify its contradictions and fractures, and to recognise the possibilities for resistance and social transformation.
Call for papers and panels
Historical Materialism Athens 2027 aims to contribute to this discussion by bringing together researchers, scholars, workers, and militants committed to engaging with and renewing the Marxist tradition. As part of the international network of Historical Materialism conferences, we seek to create a comradely and egalitarian space for rigorous debate, political exchange, and solidarity that cross disciplinary and national boundaries.
We particularly welcome individual papers and panel proposals addressing the following non-exclusive themes:
- Antonio Gramsci: life, work, hegemony, and political strategy
- Contemporary fascisms, the far right, and authoritarian transformations of the state
- War, genocide, imperialism, and anti-imperialist resistance
- Colonialism, racial capitalism, migration and refugee struggles, borders, and anti-racist resistance
- Class composition, labour, unionism, and new forms of workers’ organising
- Political strategy, movements, parties, and contemporary struggles
- Technological transformations and their political and ideological implications
- Capitalist accumulation, crisis, financialisation, and social reproduction
- Value theory and critique of political economy
- Marxist feminisms, gender and sexuality, queer and trans struggles
- Ecological catastrophe, extractivism, and ecosocialist alternatives
- Marxism, disability and crip theory, madness, and the critique of ableism
- Marxist theories of culture, art, literature, aesthetics, ideology.
We also welcome proposals on other subjects that contribute to critical Marxist theory, historical research, and political debate. Contributions from different disciplines and political traditions, as well as work grounded in collective organising and struggle, are encouraged.
Stream Call for Papers will be launched in the next days.
Finally, the organising collective of Historical Materialism Athens would like to dedicate the conference to the loving memory of our comrade, friend, and leading Marxist and Gramscian theorist Peter D. Thomas, who tragically passed away in October. Historical Materialism Athens 2027 will hold a series of panels honouring Peter’s groundbreaking work.
Submissions due until December 15.
Submit a paper or propose a panel.
Submissions via email will not be accepted.