Call For Papers: After Capitalism

EDITORS: PIOTR JUSKOWIAK, MICHAŁ POSPISZYL

„Capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed. To do what has to be done will take tenacity and determination, patience and cunning, along with fierce political commitments born out of moral outrage […]. Political mobilisations sufficient to such a task have occurred in the past. They can and will surely come again. We are, I think, past due”.

D. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, and the Crises of Capitalism

Does the collapse of capitalism mark an inevitable consequence inscribed in its unlimited, but always nonlinear development or is it barely constantly displaced horizon understood as a necessary condition of sustaining and improving the system? Is it possible to think about any capitalism’s after, when our social frameworks of memory seem to be already emptied from any pre-capitalist content (in economic and every other sense of the term)? How to imagine the unimaginable end of capitalism (at least in Western societies in contrast to, as Slavoj Žižek claims, long-domesticated end of the world)? Is it possible for us to achive this goal using the peripheral accomplishments in managing the common?

These are just some of the questions raised by “Theoretical Practice” in collaboration with the organizers of “After Capitalism” conference. They result from the inherent interconnection between indignation and hope as well as from the conviction that thinking of alternatives to the current system (in its local variations) is one of the biggest challenges for radical social scientists and practitioners of glocal anti-capitalist movement. Current meta-crisis as a combination of particular crises e.g. (ecological, economic, political) determines the "end of the world as we know it" (Claus Leggewie, Harald Welzer), clearly forcing us to think about another world, even if it entails signs of utopia.

It is worth considering, however, whether the new utopian projects do not repeat faults of the old ones, being essentially, as Elizabeth Grosz writes, the ideals of privileged imposed on the bodies and minds of subaltern groups. What vision of post-capitalist societies does arise from the perspective of the latter? How the after of capitalism will handle the sexual, gender, cultural and species differences? Will it avoid its dystopian materialization which was the fate of every historical utopia?

We have no doubt that post-capitalist future that would truly deserve its name must destroy all forms of dependencies exploited by the capitalism. The growing evidence of communist horizon (though usually in a non-European context, e.g. in Latin America) is inconceivable without its post-colonial, feminist, queer and post-human dimensions. This is the lesson to be taken not only from such thinkers as Gayatri Spivak, Arundhati Roy, Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Rosi Braidotti, Chandra Mohanty, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Silvia Federici, Donna Haraway, Paulo Freire, Arturo Escobar, Alvaro Garcia Linera and Susan Buck-Morss, but also from the voices coming to us from outside the Western academia.

Other problems that we would like to address in this issue include:

-          Crisis nature of capitalism;

-          Future of communism;

-          Common political potential of class, gender and racial struggles;

-          Non-capitalist and non-Western models of economy – history, present status, prospects;

-          Post-capitalist utopias (including feminist, queer, post-human ones);

-          Images of post-capitalist world in art and popular culture;

-          Potential of resistance and subversion against the capitalist mode of production;

-          History and current practice of anti-capitalist movements;

-          Ideas and practices of cooperative movement, cooperation, autonomy;

-         Liberation theology and peripheral anti-capitalist struggles.

The next issue of "Theoretical Practice” is also open for the articles unrelated to its main theme (Varia). The deadline for the submissions is 20^th May 2013. Planned publication: September 2013.