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

Atmospheric Imperialism and the Reification of Nature
Ashima Mittal, Anthropology, University of Chicago
The Vertical Farm: Modularity & Settler-Colonial Logic
Hayley Birss, Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology, University of Toronto
Typologies of Fossil Capitalism
Casey Mathur, History / Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization, University of Chicago

Faculty Moderator: Joe Masco, Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences in the College

2:30-2:45 PM
Break

2:45-4:15 PM
Spatial Orders of Dispossession, Displacement, and Excess

Trading Trash in the Era of Perpetual Crisis: Managing Consumer Waste Across Temporalities
James Bradley, History, University of Chicago
The Hidden Abodes of Urbanization
William Conroy, Urban Planning (Graduate School of Design), Harvard University
Fields of Unemployment and the Field of Employment: Settler Colonialism in Early-Nineteenth-Century Political Economy
Jack Davies, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz

Faculty Moderator: François G. Richard, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Romance Languages & Literatures, and Social Sciences in the College

4:15-4:30 PM
Break

4:30-6:00 PM
(Un)Free labor, Precarious labor, Dead labor

World(s) Of Precarity: Surplus Workers at the heart of Industries and Labor Actions in India
Ankit Sharma, Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz
The Perfect Slave: A Political Theory of Automation
Nicolae Biea, Political Science, University of Chicago
Coercing Free Labor: Contracts, Debt, and Dependence in British Honduras, 1847-1900
Kate Reed, History, University of Chicago

Faculty Moderator: Joy Wang, Harper-Schmidt Fellow & Collegiate Assistant Professor

6:00–7:00 PM
Reception

SATURDAY, MAY 11, 2024

10:00–10:30 AM
Breakfast

10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Monetary Regimes of Finance Capital

Karl Polanyi and the Normative Orders of Global Finance
Stefan Macleod, Political Science, University of Toronto
Cattle Money: Texas’ Counterrevolutionary Economy, 1836 and Now
Emma Pask, Anthropology, University of Chicago
Dealing with it all: limits to the politics of liquidity
Nic Johnson, History, University of Chicago

Faculty Moderator: Chiara Cordelli, Professor in the Department of Political Science

12:00–1:00 PM
Lunch

1:00–2:30 PM
Aesthetic Registers of Capitalist (Re)Production

Counterfeiting: Symmetries of Money, Photography, and Cinema
Wolfgang Boehm, Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago
The Reenactment Zone: Surplus Labor and Nathan Fielder’s Monotone
Paola Del Toro, English, Princeton University
Unruling the Earth: Empire in the Cartographic Void
Tyler Lutz, English, University of Chicago

Faculty Moderator: Lisa Wedeen, Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science and the College, Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT)

2:30–2:45 PM
Break

2:45-4:15 PM
Class Formations and Class Struggle

Militant Milieux: Political Prefiguration among Parisian Youth Protesters
Navid Mazidabadifarahani, Social Sciences, University of Chicago
Shifting Landscapes of Labor Politics: From Union Bargaining to Legal Redressal
Poornima Rajeshwar, Anthropology, Stanford University
The Petit-Proprietary Critics: from Aristocratic Liberals to Karl Marx
Isa Lappalainen, Politics, Uppsala University / University of Pennsylvania

Faculty Moderator: Daragh Grant, Senior Lecturer, Social Sciences Collegiate Division

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.