Understanding the Conjuncture: Political Capitalism, Class Dealignment & Strategies for the Left

How should we understand the moment in history we are living through? Is neoliberalism mutating into something new? Have electoral coalitions been reshaped forever? And how should the left respond?
Dylan Riley has sparked a generative debate about the nature of contemporary capitalism and politics in a series of essays in New Left Review (Faultlines, 2020; Seven Theses on American Politics, 2022). He is joined by Matt Karp and James Foley to discuss these interventions, the changes that have reshaped politics, and the strategic dilemmas faced by the contemporary left internationally.
The event was presented in collaboration with Conter.
James Foley is a lecturer in Political Science at Glasgow Caledonian University. His research engages questions of capitalist crisis and class dealignment from a European perspective.
James is the author of The Scottish Economy and Nationalism (Routledge, 2023), Scotland After Britain (Verso, 2022) and is the editor of Contesting Cosmopolitan Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). He is a member of the editorial board of Conter, and has written for a variety of publications including The Guardian, Open Democracy and The Socialist Register.
Matthew Karp is a historian at Princeton of the U.S. Civil War era and its relationship to the nineteenth-century world.
He recently published “Party and Class in American Politics” in New Left Review, a reply to Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner’s “Seven Theses on American Politics”.
Matt’s first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard, 2016) explores the ways that slavery shaped U.S. foreign relations before the Civil War. It received the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association, the James Broussard Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Karp is now at work on two books. The first, Millions of Abolitionists: The Republican Party and the Political War on Slavery, considers the emergence of American antislavery mass politics. The second book, a meditation on the politics of U.S. history, explores the ways that narratives of the American experience both serve and shape different ideological ends - in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and today.
Dylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dylan Riley recently authored two influential essays analyzing the conjuncture in American politics in New Left Review: “Faultlines,” and “Seven Theses on American Politics” (with Robert Brenner).
He is the author of The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, Verso, 2019). He is also the co-author of a two-volume work with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed entitled Antecedents of Censuses: From Medieval to Nation States and Changes in Censuses: From Imperialism to Welfare States (Palgrave 2016). In addition to these books, he has published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Sociology, Contemporary Sociology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Social Science History, The Socio Economic Review and the New Left Review (of which he is a member of the editorial committee). His work has been translated into German, Russian, and Spanish.

[@Keli-nw8fy]

When Amercans talk about capitalism and China in the same paragraph I get a head ache 😰