CRMEP Graduate Conference | Title: Reading Capital 60 Years On

The publication of Reading Capital [Lire le capital] marked an event in the full philosophical sense of the term: at the same time a rupture and irreversible beginning. A collaborative, seminary effort between multiple authors - convened by Louis Althusser - the text proposed a radical new reading of Das Kapital, one that was intentionally partial and unorthodox, and all the more productive for being so. Its almost immediate success within both domestic and international circles inaugurated a new tradition of philosophical thought under the banner of structural Marxism, thematising notions such as symptomatic reading, militant science, structural causality and theoretical anti-humanism. The precocious seminary contributors invariably went on to become hugely influential forces themselves, from Pierre Macherey, Jacques Ranciere, and Roger Esablet, to the beloved, one-time Professor at the CRMEP, Etienne Balibar.
On the occasion of its 60-year anniversary, this conference seeks to revisit the intellectual legacy of Reading Capital, investigating its contemporary relevance, as well as the polemics that have emerged since its publication. We thereby invite papers that critically reflect on this legacy, drawing attention to the limits of the work as well as its unexplored potentials. We would also like to welcome papers that engage with Capital itself, and the various other readings that have become canonised in the intervening decades. Papers will therefore be categorised into the following streams:
Conference Programme and Schedule

9:30 – Arrival

10:00–11:15am – 1st Keynote 

Svenja Bromberg (Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London)

‘What becomes of ‘critique’ after the epistemological break and the late Marx’s entrance to science? — Marx’s method after and beyond Reading Capital’

Break: 11:15–11:30


11:30–1:00pm – Panel 1: Reading Capital
This panel invites papers that directly engage with Marx’s Capital project as a critical text, focusing on unresolved problems of interpretation, translations, intellectual histories, lacunae and tensions, and so on.

Cooper Francis (CRMEP Alumnus)

‘The Structure of Exchange Society’

Nicole S. Monaghan (CRMEP MA)

‘On the Concept of the Proletariat’

Billie Cashmore (CRMEP PhD)

‘The Appearance of Value in Capital’

Lunch Break: 1:00pm–2:00pm


2:00–3:30m – Panel 2: Reading Reading Capital
Readings of Reading Capital itself, attending to thematics raised by one or more of its component texts, the continuity/discontinuity of the project as a whole, the resulting trajectories of its individual authors, or the circumstances of its production and reception histories.

Felicia Jing (New School for Social Research/Johns Hopkins University)

‘Science: from Munich to May’

Ralph Kalid (Concordia University)

‘Althusser’s Critique(s) of Hegel and the Turn to Spinoza’

Michael Giesbrecht (Duquesne University)

‘The Work of Concepts: Pierre Macherey on Marx’s “Process of Exposition” in Capital and Materialist Epistemology’

Break: 3:30–3.45pm


3.45–5:15pm – Panel 3 : Reading readings of Capital
Finally, readings of one or more of the various interpretative traditions to which Capital - and Marx’s wider corpus - have given rise, evaluated in critical relation to structural Marxism. These could include, but are not limited to: Postcolonial and feminist readings, German Critical Theory, the Neue-Marx Lekture, Value-Form Theory, Operaismo and Autonomia Operaia, the ‘State debates’, Legal Form Theory, Political Marxism, Social Reproduction Theory.

Thomas Waller & Sean O’Brien (UC Dublin; University of Bristol)

‘Marx to the Letter’

Anna Beria (CRMEP)

‘Reading Capital and Reading Reading Capital Through the Concept of Life’

Daniel Fraser (UC Cork)

‘Useful Angels: Marxist Modernity in Bolívar Echeverría and Walter Benjamin’

Break: 5:15–5:30pm


5.30pm–6:45pm – Closing Keynote

Peter Hallward (Professor of Modern European Philosophy, CRMEP)

‘Must the Working Class Die so the Proletariat Can Live?’
6.45 – End