When: Monday, December 12, 2022, 6:15 PM - 7:45 PMWhere: School of Law, Room 202 Mile End Road London E1 4NS
Welcome to the in-person launch of our new 'Law and Marxism: Speaker Series' with Dr Rob Knox, hosted by the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London.
In recent years, after a long absence, the term ‘capitalism’ has returned to public debate. Triggered in part by the 2008 financial crisis, the long austerity which followed and political movements contesting both, the concept capitalism has become a central element in describing the world and understanding how it needs to change. Alongside this, the uneven results of capitalisms’ crises have helped undergird new attention to its relationship to race and racialisation.
These developments have been matched in the academy, including – perhaps surprisingly – the field of law. The rise of the Law and Political Economy movement, and an increased prominence of the term ‘racial capitalism’ in legal scholarship are testament to this. Yet, though such work frequently invokes ‘capitalism’ as a term, it also often - implicitly or explicitly - operates in opposition to the perhaps most famous account of capitalism: that of the Marxist tradition. Most significantly, many of these contemporary accounts do not address the ‘laws of motion’ which Marxists have argued are central to capitalism. More often, they stress the contingency and historicity of capitalism, often with a focus on law’s role in constructing many different capitalisms.
This talk offers an alternative to this. I begin by sketching out the Marxist account of capitalism, its internal logic, and its laws of motion. I situate this against Marxist accounts of law and legal theory more broadly, before demonstrating how such approaches are able to explain the changing nature of law and its relationship to processes of capitalist accumulation, as well as the role of race and racialisation therein. In this way, I seek to demonstrate that whilst capitalism is indeed protean and historically contingent, it is nonetheless structured by systematic imperatives.
Ultimately, I argue, this Marxist understanding of capitalism helps us to navigate the shape that capitalism, law and race take in particular conjunctures. It does by focusing on the way in which the systematic imperatives of capital accumulation ultimately condition and limit what is possible in any given moment. Such a position, I argue, has crucial consequences for understanding the political possibilities offered to us by law in transforming – or transcending – capitalist social relations.
Dr Robert Knox is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool. He is a member of the editorial boards of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and the London Review of International Law. He is also a member of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize Committee and the Left Book Club panel.