Description

 The Historical Materialism and International Relations seminar series seeks to explore and develop the multiple points of contact between Marxist theory and international relations, most broadly defined. It does so with the double aim of investigating the critical and explanatory potentials of Marxism in the domain of international relations, as well as to probe what an engagement with ‘the international’ might contribute to Marxist theory. The seminar series is associated with the journal of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and its forthcoming ‘Historical Materialism and International Relations’ book series.

The seminars will be given at 5 pm on Thursdays in Seminar Room C, Department of Politics and International Relations. Convener: Alexander Anievas.

Peter Thomas

23.Feb: ‘Uneven Developments, Combined: Gramsci and Trotsky on Permanent Revolution’

Abstract: This paper will explore the different formulations of the notion of Permanent Revolution in the work of Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky. Although Gramsci himself explicitly rejected Trotsky's notion of permanent revolution as a reversion to a strategy of 'war of movement', he also claimed that his development of the theory of hegemony could be regarded as a contemporary form of Marx and Engels's notion of the 'Revolution in Permanence'. The paper will analyse the similarities and differences of the two seemingly divergent claims to inherit a central perspective of the classical Marxist tradition, and will argue that thinking the concepts of permanent and passive revolution together enables us to clarify and to make explicit dimensions that remain underdeveloped in each theorist's respective work.

Peter Thomas is Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at Brunel University, London. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Brill, 2009), and (with Juha Koivisto) Mapping Communication and Media Research: Conjunctures, Institutions, Challenges (Tampere University Press, 2010) and co-editor (with Riccardo Bellofiore and Guido Starosta) of In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse (Brill, 2010). He has published widely on Marxist political theory and philosophy, the history of political thought and the history of philosophy.