Coordinators: Siyaves Azeri siyaves.azeri@ubbcluj.ro, Stefan Baghiu stefan.baghiu@ubbcluj.ro 

In our present interregnum—this thickened moment of suspended historical development, where crises proliferate but refuse to precipitate a new world—the question of class returns with renewed urgency. Far from a sociological category or demographic partition, class must be grasped as a contradictory social relation continuously constituted and reproduced within capitalist relations of production. The polycrisis does not diminish the relevance of class; it intensifies and clarifies it. Under the conditions of permanentized crisis, the fetishized forms of capitalist social relations—value, labour, capital—assert themselves more forcefully, reproducing the everyday appearance of classes as “groups” rather than as forms of political mediation and struggle.

Against such reified understandings, we call for a return to a Marxist conceptualization of class as the mode of being of the human basis of capitalist social relations, a fluid actuality logically preceded by its concept. Class emerges only through class struggle—indeed, class is class struggle. In this sense, both the capitalist and the worker are personifications of economic categories, embodiments of the contradictory logic of capital itself. This conceptuality, exposing class as a form of political mediation rather than a natural given, is indispensable in a moment when liberal and identity-based understandings of social antagonism falter amidst global turbulence.

This stream invites reflections that rethink class not as identity but as political tendency, immanent contradiction, and moment of social practice. Class consciousness, in this perspective, is not an external supplement but a form of activity internal to class struggle. The movement from the “class-in-itself” to the “class-for-itself” is not a psychological awakening but the practical, political process through which the proletariat approaches its own concept—one that paradoxically contains the abolition of its own conditions of existence. In today’s global interregnum, when capital appropriates and transforms all pre-existing forms of domination (from racialized labour to gendered oppression), a political economy of class must also reveal how these oppressions are mediated and reproduced through capitalist social relations.

We welcome contributions that explore these themes, including but not limited to:

• Conceptual and methodological reconsiderations of class as a social relation
• Class struggle as political mediation: class-in-itself and class-for-itself revisited
• Labour, abstract labour, and the critique of labour as a transhistorical category
• The personifications of economic categories (capitalist, worker) and the logic of capital
• Conceptuality, contradiction, and the dialectical method in political economy
• The relationship between class, consciousness, and political organization
• Class, gender, race, and other forms of mediated domination under capitalism
• Crisis, polycrisis, and the reproduction of class relations in the contemporary moment
• Eastern European and global perspectives on labour and class formation
• Normativity, praxis, and the abolition of class as both outcome and condition of revolutionary transformation

Coordinators: Adela Hincu adela.hincu@ubbcluj.ro; Leyla Safta-Zecheria leyla.safta@ubbcluj.ro

Historic and contemporary struggles around the value of labor, care, and education raise fundamental questions about how social reproduction happens in our societies. Socialist feminist approaches have long emphasized how care and education labor—often feminized, racialized, classed, and labelled as “non-productive” or not sufficiently productive—has been historically devalued in different sociopolitical configurations. Today, the double movement of expanding global care chains, coupled with the transnationalization of domestic labor and the emergence of care deserts, and increased militarization coupled with the risings tides of austerity affecting both social and educational infrastructures and practices, alongside an acceleration of the planetary ecosocial consequences of environmental crises and their impact on the lives of ecosocially marginalized and racialized persons, point to a potential turning point in how social reproduction is practiced. The present overlapping crises feed new imagineries of community, care, education and racialized and gendered relations that often go hand in hand with authoritarian patriarchal imagineries promoted by the far right everywhere, but also have the potential of generating new forms of intersectionally transformative organizing, refusal, and critique.

This stream invites contributions that engage with socialist feminism both as a historical reality, as well as a contemporaneous political epistemology. More broadly, we invite explorations into how current and past conjunctures shape processes of (unequal) social reproduction within capitalist and socialist political formations as well as the transnational intersectional struggles engaging with these processes. Feminist and queer analyses of war, austerity, and economic restructuring have brought questions of social reproduction, housing, education, and care work to the forefront. Crises place intensified burdens on women and other marginalized groups—queer communities, disabled people, the elderly, children—while also generating new solidarities, practices of care, and political claims. Research on Eastern Europe has further revealed the tensions between socialist-era policies on women and care, their achievements and unfulfilled promises, and the anti-communist and anti-feminist climate shaping feminist activism since 1989. These tendencies intersect with global processes, including anti-gender movements, democratic backsliding, and the reconfiguration of care economies through austerity measures.

Therefore the present stream invites contributions that engage with (but are not limited to) the following questions:

• How have crises (economic, political, ecological, military, or social) historically and globally affected social reproduction and everyday survival?
• How do intersecting marginalities (gender, sexuality, disability, class, age, race/ethnicity, migration status, and others) shape experiences of crisis?
• How do care and educational practices shape social and political imaginaries, and how are they themselves shaped by these imaginaries? How do they generate, constrain, or transform spaces for political organization and social solidarity?
• How can care and education be conceptualized beyond human subjects? What might posthuman or multi-species approaches to care and learning look like?
• How do transnational care chains operate, and how do they intersect with racialized and economic inequalities in the Global North and Global South?
• How do global inequalities shape displacement, commodification, or withdrawal of care, including care deserts, migration of care workers, and the division of care responsibilities across regions?
• How do feminist, queer, and socialist movements theorize and organize around crises, and how have these configurations evolved over time?
• What are the specific contributions of feminist, queer, and socialist movements to theorizing and organizing around care, labor, and social reproduction? How have anti-gender, anti-feminist, and anti-communist discourses shaped feminist, queer, and socialist responses, particularly in Eastern Europe?
• How have different strands of feminism and socialist thought converged or diverged in addressing care, labor, and intersectional struggles? What alternative imaginaries and practices—utopian, post-work, or radical solidarities—have emerged from these movements?

Coordinators: Siyaves Azeri siyaves.azeri@ubbcluj.ro, Stefan Baghiu stefan.baghiu@ubbcluj.ro, Alex Cistelecan alexandru.cistelecan@ubbcluj.ro 

In a moment defined by deepening crisis and a prolonged historical standstill—an interregnum in which capitalist social relations continue to reproduce their contradictions without pointing toward a new epoch—the question of political organization becomes decisive. The crisis of value and the resulting intensification of class struggle do not automatically generate emancipatory outcomes. They also produce the conditions for the rise of right-wing populism and authoritarianism, political forms through which capital seeks to reconstitute its rule in the face of its own crisis tendencies. These developments reveal not an aberration from bourgeois democracy, but a structural tendency of capitalist society itself, a reassertion of the state as the political form of value’s domination

Within this conjuncture, the Left’s strategic dilemmas sharpen. Class struggle is permanent and polymorphous, embedded in all social conflicts—from wage struggles and fights over working conditions to uprisings for equality, secularism, bodily autonomy, and against discrimination. Yet class struggle, taken in itself, does not guarantee an emancipatory trajectory. Class exists as a politically mediated social relation, and its movement can be redirected toward reactionary horizons when emancipatory political forms are absent; conversely, it can generate revolutionary consciousness only when adequate organizational and strategic mediation is provided

The central task of the Left in this interregnum is thus one of articulation: to give political form, horizon, and strategy to the diffuse antagonisms produced by capitalist crisis. In the absence of such mediation, right-wing populism fills the vacuum—offering mystified, personalized, and nationalist interpretations of systemic contradictions, and mobilizing masses around reactionary solutions. At the same time, the present moment continues to reveal explosive possibilities for emancipatory politics: from the Arab Spring to Occupy; from anti-austerity mobilizations to the 2019 uprising of the urban poor in Iran; from the mass “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising; to the marches of millions in the United States against the would-be “King”; to the recent wave of workers’ and students’ protests in Italy against austerity and the ongoing genocide in Gaza—each of these points toward the persistent potential for radical transformation contained within class struggle itself

This stream invites contributions that examine the strategic, organizational, and practical problems of left politics today, grounded in Marxist theory and attentive to contemporary social struggles. We welcome proposals addressing (but not limited to):

• Forms of political mediation within class struggle
• Organization, party-form, and the problem of leadership
• Left strategies in an age of right-wing populism and authoritarianism
• Crisis of value and its implications for political mobilization
• Trade unionism, social movements, and their limits
• Revolutionary organization vs. spontaneous movements
• Class composition, consciousness, and politicization
• The role of the state in shaping (and suppressing) emancipatory struggles
• Lessons from recent movements and uprisings across the globe
• Strategic debates on reform, rupture, and dual power
• Organizing in Eastern Europe and the Global South under conditions of interregnum

Coordinator: Siyaves Azeri siyaves.azeri@ubbcluj.ro

Modern capitalist society is constituted through antagonistic social relations whose contradictions crystallize in the political form of the state. Far from standing above civil society as an external arbiter, the state is the historically specific mode of existence of these contradictions: it is the political form through which capital’s permanent crisis becomes organized, mediated, and reproduced. The state’s apparent autonomy—its position as a distinct authority vis-à-vis civil society—is not an independence from social relations but the necessary form in which those relations appear. It is the mediated “independence” through which class antagonisms are contained, while simultaneously being the terrain on which they are reproduced and intensified.

A Marxian analysis of the state must therefore begin with its human essence, the historically determined form in which human sociality appears as an alien, coercive power. The separation between the “civil” and the “political,” so central to bourgeois ideology, is itself an expression of crisis: the depoliticization of civil society is accomplished only through a profoundly political act, one that continuously reinstates the abstract individual as the bearer of bourgeois right while suppressing the concrete social individual whose life-activity capital appropriates. In this sense, the state is not the resolution of social conflict but the form of its persistence—the political incarnation of capital’s contradictory movement of valorization and its incessant requirement to reproduce doubly “free” labour.

The state is thus simultaneously the result and medium of class struggle. Its institutional form is inseparable from the permanent production of surplus populations, the policing of borders and territories, the juridical constitution of abstract equality, and the ongoing expropriation that underpins accumulation. On the international scale, states operate as political units of capital’s global expansion, where imperialism, war, and “emergency” are not deviations but structural moments of the state’s existence. The modern capitalist state is therefore always a crisis-state: the guarantor of order, the producer of “freedom under external laws,” and the instrument through which the appearance of social neutrality is maintained.

Yet the contradictory character of the state also reveals the limits of any purely immanent reproduction of capitalist social relations. If the free association of free, genuinely social individuals is to be historically realized, the political form of domination must itself be confronted, transformed, and ultimately seized. The negation of the capitalist state requires a political movement capable of appropriating its concentrated power, dissolving its coercive universality, and reconstituting social relations on a non-alienated, collective, and emancipatory basis. Without the seizure and transformation of political power, the reproduction of abstract individuality and the permanence of crisis will remain intact.

This stream welcomes contributions that examine the state as the political form of capitalist social relations; interrogate the contradictions embedded in the constitution of law, right, territory, citizenship, and coercive apparatuses; and explore the reconfiguration of state power in moments of intensified crisis.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• The state as the political form of capitalist crisis
• State, law, and the constitution of the abstract individual
• State mediation, class antagonism, and the reproduction of labour-power
• Territory, borders, and the political form of separation
• The state as the producer and manager of surplus populations
• Bourgeois right, citizenship, and the contradictory unity of the civil/political
• State institutions as forms of appearance of class domination
• Crisis, emergency, and the “strong state”
• State and the reproduction of private property
• The state in postcapitalist horizons
• State, nation, religion, and the logic of abstraction
• Surveillance, policing, and the technological intensification of domination
• Border regimes, migration, and the geopolitics of exclusion
• Regional crises and uneven state-formation in Eastern Europe
• Transformations of state power under localized polycrisis and interregnum

Coordinator: Martin Küpper martin.kupper@ubbcluj.ro

Ecosocialism has been making important contributions to the critical analysis of social, political, and cultural forms of socializations throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Its strength and potential became manifest even more emphatically since it grew clear that the ecological crisis has taken on global proportions. How should progressive forces prepare to intervene in a world of such deepened catastrophe? What are the prospects for ecological action on the different continents? What does the landscape of resistance look like? What theoretical and practical contributions can support an emancipatory practice beyond capitalist socialization? While ecosocialism convincingly shows that the capitalist economic system is fundamentally incompatible with the ecological and social requirements of sustainability, it does not constitute a unified field, but proceeds through discussion and debate – including in what concerns its own tools, concepts and perspectives.

These contemporary discussions are intertwined with the re-examination of the history of socialism. Recent studies shifted focus to socialist contributions to ecology and offered new ecological readings of Marx and Engels, as well as research about some bold re-interpretations of Marxism such as the increasing integration of ecological issues into Marxism-Leninism, e.g. by Wolfgang Harich, Rudolf Bahro or Yevgeny K. Feodorov. Or the renewed focus on the concept of aesthetic environmental design, which deals with the aesthetic design of living spaces and the aesthetic perception of nature. This also allowed for building a more nuanced image of state socialism, one that includes not only the catastrophic environmental effects of Soviet grandiose projects but also its important contribution to ecology as science, large environmentalist initiatives and visions of a more sustainable relationship with nature. Above all, however, the intellectual and real history of state socialism can serve both as the reservoir of concrete experiences for our political imagination and the warning that even a socialist society is not automatically immune to creating, producing and exacerbating ecological problems.

Consequently, we invite contributions on the following list of indicative topics, among others:

• Dialectics of nature
• Relations between natural sciences and philosophy
• History of ecosocialism
• Ecosocialism and the anthropocene
• The relation between ecoutopism and political practice
• Economic, political, and industrial characteristics of planetary communism
• Industrialism and ecology: the developmental paradigms facing limits to growth
• Ecology and theories of revolution
• Criticism of new materialism and posthumanism
• Criticism of current ecological strategies (e.g. geoengineering)
• Criticism of ecofascism and the discourse over local resources

Coordinators: Alex Cistelecan alexandru.cistelecan@ubbcluj.ro, Ádám Takács  adam.takacs@ubbcluj.ro

Periods of social and political stagnation can, paradoxically, coincide with moments of intense theoretical and intellectual effervescence. The long decade separating us from the economic depression of 2008—marked by salvos of war, cascading catastrophes, and a deepening polycrisis—has witnessed a renewed and prolific interest in Marxism and critical theory. In this cycle of rediscovery, many long-standing liberal political and ethical certainties have faded from view; yet Marxism itself has hardly remained intact. Its foundational theoretical assumptions and conceptual architectures have been reopened, contested, and reworked: the classic labor theory of value has been reassessed; the tendency of the falling rate of profit retested and redrawn; Marx’s core conceptual distinctions—productive vs. reproductive labor, base vs. superstructure, forces vs. relations of production, rent vs. profit, and beyond—have been revisited and reformulated. Simultaneously, key philosophical presuppositions—anthropocentrism, speciesism, productivism, economism—have been challenged and partially displaced. Critical theory appears to be reconnecting with both its original philosophical lineages and its political ambitions, entering a renewed phase of intense debate appropriate to our current interregnum.

This stream welcomes all investigations into these recent evolutions in the field of Marxism and critical theory. Possible angles include:

• Labor theory of value revisited
• Theories of crisis and polycrisis
• The law and code of capital
• Eastern and Western Marxist theory
• Marxist perspectives on technology
• New developments in Marxist historiography
• World-System Theory today
• Metamorphoses of political capitalism
• New theories of imperialism
• Frankfurt School then and now
• Avatars and afterlives of French theory
• Marxism and speculative realism
• Marxism and critical phenomenology

Coordinators: Stefan Baghiu stefan.baghiu@ubbcluj.ro, Christian Ferencz-Flatz christian.ferencz@ubbcluj.ro, Mihnea Bâlici mihnea.balici@ubbcluj.ro, Ana Szel ana.szel@ubbcluj.ro, Liri Chapelan liri.chapelan@ubbcluj.ro

Although Marx himself wrote little about literature, historical materialism soon became a well-known tool for analyzing literary products, not only through sociological interventions in the literary field, but also as a reading of the ideologemes which permeate it. Whether interested in explorations of the materiality of the fictional world or adhering to a Marxist program of perspectivizing various class struggles, literary and fictional representations today increasingly seem to demand adherence to the historical materialist origins of the data of reality.

In a similar vein, classical Marxist interpretations saw media as part and parcel of the late capitalist transformations of the cultural field under the impact of industrialization, accelerated technological development, and mass consumption, leading to commodification and reification, but also potentially offering tools for social emancipation. These structural views of technologically mediated culture as a social product and instrument materialized in fine-grained critical readings tracing the ideological refractions of cinematic or televisual. Such views have infiltrated and fertilized contemporary media studies in various regards. At the same time, they have inspired diverse radical and oppositional practices of filmmaking and media activism in the Western world, the East, and the Global South.

But how do the principles of Marxist cultural theory fare in our contemporary post-industrial world, marked by new processes and understandings of work, knowledge, and culture, and in a period of intense technological upheaval, which seems to leave no stone unturned? Moreover: how do they perform at a time, when the impact of media has extended far beyond the cultural field, pervading processes of labor, economic arrangements, and social relationships? This stream hosts papers arguing for the continuous relevance of Marxist reflection on media and artistic production in a contemporary world of new perils, requiring new forms of engagement and combat, with a special emphasis on Eastern European media activism, local traditions of socialist reflections on literature, film, and media, as well as the history of state socialist entanglements with the media.

• We particularly encourage contributions in the following areas:
• Materialist approaches in world literary studies
• Literary systems within and beyond state socialism
• Peripheral histories of radical literature
• Intersectional approaches to literary studies
• Literary production and precarity
• Literary politics of representation
• State socialism and the media
• New media and post-labour
• Platform capitalism
• Cultural politics and pop culture
• Critical approaches to visual AI
• Decolonial turn in media studies
• Ecosocialist readings of media
• Radical film culture and traditions
• Cinematic discourses of class, poverty, precarity, and social exclusion
• Counterforensics, investigative commons, activist journalism
• Media activism

Coordinators: Monika Woźniak monika.wozniak@ubbcluj.ro, Jan Mervart jan.mervart@ubbcluj.ro

In the long twentieth century, the concept of the scientific and technological revolution formed a central pillar of Marxist thought across state-socialist countries and beyond. Political architects of both Soviet and non-Soviet socialist experiments—whether in Yugoslavia or Chile—invested heavily in the promise of technological and scientific advance to rationalize economic life, cybernetically reorganize planning and production, and enhance labor productivity. For many Marxists, this wager carried an emancipatory horizon: only a profound “revolution in the means of production,” powered by scientific knowledge, could propel socialist societies toward the long-anticipated realm of freedom. For others, however, the same project raised alarms: technological acceleration appeared as a potential vector of domination, a machinery through which a super-personal system could discipline, streamline, and ultimately constrain the free development of human capacities.

These tensions have hardly vanished in our present interregnum. After the collapse of state socialism—and amid today’s deepening polycrisis—the question persists with renewed urgency: do scientific and technological innovations open fresh emancipatory and revolutionary possibilities, or have they been largely absorbed into the coercive apparatuses of late capitalism, reinforcing the status quo or even crystallizing new forms of “digital dictatorship”? What modes of Marxist critique are emerging in response to contemporary techno-scientific transformations, and to what extent do these transformations constitute a horizon—or a limit—to today’s emancipatory struggles?

We welcome contributions investigating Marxist approaches to science and technology, including but not limited to:

• Marxist and non-Marxist readings of scientific and technological progress
• The political role of the techno-scientific revolution in state-socialist countries
• Technology and transformations in knowledge production
• Varieties of technological critique
• Marxist analyses of high-technology capitalism
• Big Data capitalism, AI, and platformization