Marxist Work Day 2023
Marxist Work Day 2023
A free two-day symposium marking important milestones in the history of Marxist thought of the past 100 years.
Thursday, 21 September 2023 & Friday 22 September 2023
Arts West Building (Building 148), Room 353
University of Melbourne, Parkville
This year marks at least three important milestones in the history of Marxist thought: the centenary of both Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) and Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (1923), and the fortieth anniversary of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983). Lukács’s and Korsch’s attempts to synthesise Hegelian speculative thought and Marxist political praxis shaped the research program of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, founded later in 1923, and the wider trajectory of what is now known as Western Marxism. Robinson’s critique of the Marxist tradition, his theorisation of racial capitalism and reassemblage of the Black Radical Tradition continues to influence radical political theory and practice today.
Inspired by the First Marxist Work Week—the event held in Frankfurt in early 1923, where Korsch, Lukács and others presented their work—the 2023 Marxist Work Day will be a symposium dedicated to making new interventions in the spirit of these thinkers. How do concepts of totality, reification and racial capitalism interact, enrich or complicate each other? What resources do these lend to our political thought and practice in the present? What is the relationship between Marxism and philosophy today?