[OPE-L] Re: The Marx International II Congress

Gerald Levy (glevy@pratt.edu)
Sat, 31 Jan 1998 13:04:11 -0500 (EST)

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The following is the announcement for the Congress by Jacques Bidet and
complements the message that I posted yesterday from Gerard and Dominique.
Thanks to Duncan the following is text-readable and unencoded./ In
solidarity, Jerry

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Announcement
The MARX INTERNATIONAL II Congress
Capitalism : Critique, Resistance, Alternatives
Paris, September 30 - October 3, 1998
Université de Paris-X Nanterre
Organized by the review Actuel Marx (P.U.F.)
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.), France

A first Marx International Congress was held in Paris in September 1995. It
met with a considerable success, bringing together some 500 researchers and
an attendance of 2000 people. It received an un expectod level of coverage
in the French and the European press. It also seems to have played a part
in the reawakening currently evident of the critique of capitalism. It has
led to the publication of six volumes of papers, and to numerous
translations.
The Congress was made possible by the cooperation of more than a hundred
reviews and academic institutions. Its Organizing Committee brought
together ten French reviews of differing political and philosophical
orientations: marxist, socialist, ecologist, feminist, libertarian. This
initiative has now been followed up by the decision to hold a second Marx
Congress. The proposed programme of research will be wider and more
international.
The topic which has been chosen is the following: Capitalism: critique,
resistance, alternatives.
The Congress will address itself to the current state of the world, to the
transformations of contemporary society -from the scale of the individual
to the scale of the globe-, to the struggles currently in progress, to the
technological and cultural revolutions, to the prospects for emancipation
now opening up.
The Congress will envisage the world as a systemic whole, and will address
the following dimensions: Globalization. The crisis of nation-states.
Transfers of sovereignty. The rise of multinationals and of inter and
supranational institutions. The subjection of the periphery.
Geo-appropriation and geodestruction. The migration of individuals and
peoples. Panurbanization. New forms of domination. The crises affecting the
Political.
The reference to Marx, at all times critical, and linked up with the other
components of modern culture, will have a dual implication. It will be
called upon in as much as this thought is directly operational in the area
where it has been a major source of inspiration: the critique of
capitalism. The reference will, furthermore, take on a wider symbolic value
in the call to an alliance and coming-together of the traditions stemming
from Marxism and socialism and the other strands and modes of analysis and
of social critique, such as feminism, ecology, cultural pluralism, and the
scientific project in general.
Our ambition is to confront all the major scientific and cultural fields,
in other words, to apprehend the intellectual project as it manifests
itself in each discipline, with its specific requirements, legitimations,
its body of procedures and of doctrine. This Second Congress will thus have
a strong "disciplinary" dimension, the piloting of which will be the
responsibility of specific groups within the various disciplines.
This pluri-polar mode of organization is a response to the requirements of
a "congress" worthy of the name, one of whose objectives is to participate
in a general movement of emancipatory struggle, and which presupposes a new
form of theoretical and cultural solidarity. We are to do so as citizens
within the institution of the university. We must therefore probe the
contemporary forms of knowledge and of cultural practice, in order to seek
out whatever is the bearer of a critique, a resistance, and an alternative
to capitalism.
We are therefore calling for the proposal of papers and contributions on
the part of researchers and research-groups, institutions or reviews,
interested by the subject of the Congress.

Actuel Marx
Organizer: Jacques BIDET
Fax 33 1 46 95 03 51, Email Jacques.Bidet@u-parisl0.fr

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