Capitalism and Its Outside: Profit, Expansion, and the Necessary Excess
Event description
Capitalism, endowed with remarkable elasticity and propagandistic power, is a mode of production whose drive aims to devour the planet, subsuming all other forms of life under its logic. It tolerates no antagonistic other alongside itself. However, it is also the first economic form that is unable to stand alone, without a non-capitalist outside as its necessary lifeline: surplus populations, speculative non-market spheres, unpaid labor, the precariat, economies of waste, carceral extraction, money markets, and technoeconomic platforms are only a few illustrative realms.
As Rosa Luxemburg argued more than a century ago, the uneven relation between capitalist and non-capitalist formations is not merely a prerequisite for capital’s genesis but an essential condition for its ongoing accumulation and maturation. Capital draws life from the erosion of its very sine qua non. As it rides varying vectors and velocities, one fraction of capital might undermine the endurance of another, if not interrupt its own conditions of possibility altogether (Gidwani, 2008; Wark, 2019). Capitalism, thus, finds itself in chronic exertion against entropy.
From the viewpoint of such contradictions and excesses, as matters of inner determination (Mészáros, 2012; Saito,
2022) and systematic necessity, how has capitalism’s outside been reconfigured, and what has it come to extrude in
the world today? How does it bear upon twenty-first-century capitalist logic, social relations of production, and
attendant ideological workings? Given especially shifts in the labor market, ecological rifts on massive scale,
phenomena like “cloud capital” (Varoufakis, 2023) and “bullshit jobs” (Graeber, 2018), how can the various
manifestations and pressures of capital’s necessary excesses be theorized? Has capitalism perfected its modus
operandi, managing so well its own fallout, that it has begun to morph beyond itself? Are we amid fundamental
shifts in capitalist regimes of value and their profit-driven logic? Or is this yet another stage of an ever-aging
capitalism?
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FRIDAY, MAY 10, 2024
| 10:00-10:30 AM Breakfast and Welcoming Remarks |
| 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Keynote lecture: Jodi Dean Becoming Neofeudal: Changing laws of motion on the social manor |
| 12:00-1:00 PM Lunch |
| 1:00-2:30 PM Climatic and Technoscientific Frontiers of Capital
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| 2:30-2:45 PM Break |
| 2:45-4:15 PM Spatial Orders of Dispossession, Displacement, and Excess
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| 4:15-4:30 PM Break |
| 4:30-6:00 PM (Un)Free labor, Precarious labor, Dead labor
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| 6:00–7:00 PM Reception |
SATURDAY, MAY 11, 2024
| 10:00–10:30 AM Breakfast |
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
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| 12:00–1:00 PM Lunch |
| 1:00–2:30 PM Aesthetic Registers of Capitalist (Re)Production
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| 2:30–2:45 PM Break |
| 2:45-4:15 PM Class Formations and Class Struggle
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| 4:15-4:30PM Wrap-up |
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Organized by Hadeel Badarni, Arwa Awan, and 3CT with support from the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture; the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights; the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization;
the Department of Political Science; and the Marion R. & Adolph J. Lichtstern Fund at the Department of Anthropology.
This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.