The third edition of the ‘Capitalist Transformations’ conference, an academic event that aims to create a space for discussion, debate and research of the social, political and economic changes taking place in the region, invites submissions on the topic ‘Capitalist Transformations in Eastern and Central Europe.’ The conference, scheduled to happen between 19 – 23 May 2025, celebrates the work of Karl Polanyi (1886 – 1964) and György Lukács (1885-1971), two intellectuals and political activists who played a key role in establishing a regional critical tradition analyzing global capitalism. Both of them received their PhD degrees at the University of Cluj / Kolozsvár at the turn of the century, when capitalism was expanding into Eastern and Central Europe and profoundly reshaping social geographies, class-structures and markets.
Conjuring up their names may be timely. One century later, their analyses are still relevant. The region has become a testing ground for radical neo-liberal reforms in the wake of the post-socialist advancement of capitalism, with that shift generating unprecedented recessions in peacetime, uneven development, social divisions and growing inequalities. The rise of right-wing populism, illiberalism, xenophobia and exploitation of racialized surplus populations are direct consequences of policies that maximized the corporate agenda while neglecting dramatic distributive dynamics and inclusive social policies.
Polanyi’s double movement and his critical insights into the dynamics of marketization and social protection or Lukács’ analysis of class-formation and the contradictions of capitalist societies are today part of a tradition that continues to inform the region’s political activism and critical thinking. The conference builds on Polanyian and Lukacsian legacies and invites scholars from the region or working on the region to contribute to sharper critical understandings of capitalism in Eastern and Central Europe.
This event is organized across five different streams. The first two streams focus on understanding regional capitalist transformations both in terms of the impact this had on our societies, labor relations and ways of life (1) and in terms of emerging macro political economies and the dynamics of regional macro-financial structures (2). The third stream is dedicated to the growing diversity of the region’s anti-capitalist critiques and to mapping out the variety of social movements and political activisms that emerged in the region in the last three decades (3). Within this context we invite scholars to look back at the actual-existing socialisms in ECE and analyze both the failures and emancipatory policies of that period. This is important for understanding the uneven economic and social foundations on which capitalism was built in the different countries in ECE, beginning with 1990, but also for a retrospective comparative perspective of how political economies actually work and what they achieve in terms of general social welfare (4). In our engagement with contemporary capitalist transformations we tend to forget that during the XIXth and early XXth century the region was to a great extent incorporated into global capitalism, albeit with wide national disparities and translations grafting it on feudal social formations. Capitalism is not something new to this region. The fifth stream focuses on early forms of capitalism in ECE and looks at modes of incorporation into European and global capitalism, capital-labor dynamics, economic and social crisis and the political movements growing in this context. With this stream we aim to better understand the region’s capitalism in a long-duree framework, but also to ask what critical theories and forms of political activism emerged during that period that enable us to better understand capitalism today (5).
Venue: The conference will take place entirely online. The previous two editions of the CT-ECE Conference (2021 and 2023) were successful in terms of attracting a wide audience that could not otherwise have afforded to travel. The main goal of the conference is to enable a wide dissemination in Eastern and Central Europe of research that is critically interrogating the capitalist transformations taking place in the region and to create networks of scholars, researchers and activists that are focusing their work on this topic.
Registration fee for conference: free for participants and for audience
Publications: One of the main aims of this conference is to enable a series of five edited volumes in order to disseminate critical scholarship focusing on capitalist transformations in ECE.
For any inquires please contact: capitalist.transformations@gmail.com
For further details on the streams and submission process, visit https://capitalist-transformations.com/