Dialectical Anthropology - Call for Papers

Workers of the World!

A Dialectical Anthropology Forum Series

Call for proposals

 “Workers of the world, unite!” has incited working classes across the globe to act in concert to break free from the chains of exploitation and oppression. This anglicized and popularised version of the last sentence of the Communist Manifesto galvanized workers in factories, mines, farms, and domestic service from Russia, to the USA and from South Africa to Iran to coalesce into a class for itself in attempts to bring down capitalism.  Written on the eve of the revolutionary wave in Europe in 1848, with the zeal and optimism that changing the social order would bring, the manifesto and this cry was the progressive pole of attraction around which even non-believers orbited during “the short twentieth century”. Relentless class conflict from above, deteriorating class consciousness from below, and the collapse of the Soviet Union have seriously compromised the ability of the Workers of the World to think, act and make history as a class for itself; all this despite the steady growth of the proletariat as a class in itself. 

There appears, then,  to be a striking contradiction between an ever larger, more interconnected, and more important global proletariat and its crippling political weakness. Explanations for this converge on the schisms and ambiguities created by the international division of labor, neoliberal globalization, the rise of finance capital, the third industrial divide, post-fordism, the dominance of power elites, managerial society, the end of history, the post-industrial age, “clash of civilizations”, and post-modernism. Strikingly, nearly all of the explanations that are popular in the media, academe, and “on the street” suggest evolutionary social dynamics that are, for the most part, external to the working class. Rarely are questions like political leadership, strategy, organizational method, institutional expression, or political program mentioned. Within the left in countless countries across the planet such discussions, of course, continue, but they rarely are made explicit within the ambit of scholarly journals, academic research and the traditional intellectuals that make up social science.  

The forum series - Workers of the World!  explores these questions and the striking contradiction between numerical strength and political weakness in the light of the problems of the decomposition and recomposition of the working class.  Each forum focuses on a regional or national setting and provides a platform for scholars, public intellectuals, activists and socialist partidarios to consider such topics as:

the characteristics of the global proletariatthe concerns that drive working class struggles in different global settingsthe impediments to acting as a class for itselfwhat went wrong historically that brought us to the current impassethe forces that condition the movement of people in and out of wage workindigenous engagements in class strugglehow workers come together in struggles around collective material intereststhe contemporary gendered dynamics of the global proletariatwhat and what are not important institutional and political expressionslabour struggles of the mobile proletariatdangers confronting our social class in the current periodthe question of political leadership and revolutionary programorganization, method and “the Leninism question”

We invite proposals that will join already published and forthcoming forums  (see below)  that will contribute toward building  a productive discussion within and beyond academic production sites.

Published forums:

Paul Durrenberger & Dimitra Doukas ,  “Class in the USA” March 2018  Volume 42: Issue 1

Bryan Palmer,  “ Approaching working-class history as struggle: a Canadian contemplation; a Marxist meditation. December 2018, Volume 42 Issue 4

Forthcoming:

Maria Inez Fernandez Alvarez, “Building From Heterogeneity: the decomposition and recomposition of the working class viewed form the “popular economy in Argentina”

Leigh Binford, “Assessing Temporary Foreign Worker Programs through the Prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program: Can They be Reformed or Should They be Eliminated?

Pun Ngai,  “The New Chinese Working Class in Struggle”

Please send expressions of interest or a proposal of approximately 300 words to:

Winnie Lem (wlem@trentu.ca (this opens in a new tab) ) or Anthony Marcus (amarcus@jjay.cuny.edu) (this opens in a new tab)