Marxist Work Day 2025

Marxist Work Day

In 2023 we held our first Marxist Work Day, a two day conference inviting Marxists, unionists, activists, students and academics to make interventions in the field of Marxist theory and action.

CRAM is delighted to support the second Marxist Work Day on 28-29 June 2025. The Marxist Work Day again invites Marxists from all across the state (or country), engaged in all forms of political struggle, focusing on all kinds of study, to come together to develop our ideas and further our work as Marxists.

This year’s theme & call for papers

Marx called the period of intense European class struggle in 1848 the “June Days” – a time when new contradictions opened within the bourgeoisie but also between it and rising proletarian forces. Today, these contradictions are arguably sharpest not in the imperial core but rather beyond it on the periphery of global capitalism.

The Marxist Work Day 2025 will therefore explore the horizons of revolutionary theory and politics from this angle: the imperial core from the perspective of the periphery and vice versa. It will be a forum for investigating the theoretical and practical dimensions of the present, emphasising decolonial and national liberation Marxisms, and theories of dependency and unequal exchange that have contributed to struggles against imperialism.

But this is a pluralistic event and all tendencies of research in Marxist theory and practice are welcome. Papers, panels and reading groups are invited that address any aspect of Marxism, from general theoretical work to specific political or historical inquiries. The Marxist Work Day is a place where people of any background or level of engagement with Marx and Marxism can share ideas: academic or non-academic, theoretical, practical or activist in orientation, specialists or non-specialists in the material. It especially welcomes work in progress.

Suggested topics for papers and panels include:

• Imperialism, ultra-imperialism, sub-imperialism and super-imperialism today
• New theoretical research in dependency theory and unequal exchange
• Key historical sequences (e.g. China after Mao; anticolonial resistance in Palestine; class struggle in the post-Soviet states; politicide in Indonesia; the Middle East after the Cold War)
• Urgent political questions (U.S. imperialism and AUKUS; Indigenous politics and the Australian national question; settler colonialism and communism; inflation and secondary exploitation of workers)
• Working-class politics and communist prospects in the imperial core
• Workers’ investigation and lessons from struggle
• Organising strategy and tactics
• Class theory today
• The decline of the US empire
• Left literature and culture: theory, interpretation, translation
• Unipolarity, multipolarity and geopolitics
• War, conflict and military Keynesianism
• Global techno-feudalism and cloud capitalism

Submissions

Please submit a 250 word proposal outlining what you’d like to talk about to marxistworkday[at]gmail.com by Sunday 13th April. We will notify you if your paper has been accepted by the end of April. We expect that most presentations during the conference will be 20 to 30 minutes, but the exact time will depend on the number of papers we receive and we will provide details at the end of April.

Organising committee

The organisers of the Marxist Work Day are students, academics, activist, unionists, writers, artists, and dedicated Marxists. The organising committee is comprised of Josh Barnes, Nandini Shah, Elena Gomez, Brendan Duncan-Shah, Ali Alizadeh and Joe Hughes.