Capitalism’s drive for surplus value is contingent on a set of class relations that get flattened out to produce the category of abstract labour and its index, “socially necessary labour time.”  Difference and particularity are subsumed and reposited in capital’s own image and mediated by the symbolic requirements of exchange and commensurability. We understand this movement of abstraction in Marx to be a representational problem for thought. 

While the last decade has seen a marked increase in critiques of colonial racial capitalism (Koshy, et al., 2022; Byrd et al., 2018), one of our key aims in this seminar is to think about racial violence and land dispossession—for example—not only as experiential social facts or historical contingencies (Sorentino, 2019; da Silva, 2007). Rather, we’re interested in how the formal categories of Marx’s critique—abstract labour, surplus value, profit, price, exchange etc., —are always already saturated by (anti-)social forms of racial violence and colonial dispossession. In this seminar, we invite elaboration on the anti-social, or the negative of sociality, as both a descriptive category that outlines the constitutive relationship between value and race, and as the real movement toward abolishing the present state of things. 

Our organising line of inquiry in this seminar is: if the social for Marx is determined by the necessary temporalities of value production (Postone, 1993), what are the anti-social forms of domination that scaffold its structural integrity? (De’Ath 2018; Vishmidt & Sutherland, 2020)? In particular, how do the categories of race, blackness, Indigeneity, and land put pressure on the central categories of Marx’s value-theory? If value is a social relation, what remains unrepresentable in terms of social necessity? 

We welcome papers that engage with these questions through approaches including, but not limited to, the following:

• Figures, tropes, and aesthetic strategies for mapping “universal negativity” of value—its bearers and displacements. (Best, 2024; Chen, 2023; Nealon 2021)
• Black studies’ and Afropessimist approaches to the problem of totality (Nesbitt, 2022; Sorentino, 2023; Sexton, 2011)
• Settler colonialism, land, and “free gifts of nature” (Bhandar, 2018; Coulthard, 2014; Manning, 2023; Park, 2016)
• Third World Marxism and the imperial composition of capital today (Kadri, 2016; Kahlili, 2020; Hanieh, 2024)
• Psychoanalysis, negativity, and the anti-social (Zizek, 1993; Marriott, 2021; Tomšič,  2018).