Critical Political Economy

Capitalism’s contradictions are once again manifesting in the form of organic crisis—simultaneously economic, political, social, and ecological. The global polycrisis of our time expresses the contradictions of capital accumulation through the limits of dispossession, financialization, and the intensified commodification of everyday life. Likewise, the limits of political representation are reflected in the rise of authoritarian governments and the proliferation of exceptional state forms. In this context of systemic decay, capital continues to reinvent its mechanisms of domination—restructuring labour, reorganizing production, and enclosing new frontiers of nature and social reproduction under the logic of value.

The Critical Political Economy stream invites contributions that ground their analysis in the Marxist critique of political economy, situating contemporary crises within the long history of capitalism’s self-perpetuating contradictions—where each resolution becomes the ground for a deeper crisis. We seek theoretically-informed and empirically-grounded interventions that trace the dynamics of accumulation, class formation, and struggle across global and local scales, revealing how shifting state forms, policy regimes, and social movements contest or consolidate the power of capital. Papers may explore, but need not be limited to, the following themes:

·   The current phase of capitalist accumulation: financialization, debt regimes, and subordinate financialization.

·   Imperialism and shifting global hierarchies of accumulation.

·   The crisis of neoliberal globalization and the political economy of transition

·   Planning, socialist transformation, and post-capitalist alternatives.

·   Theoretical debates in Marxist value theory, rent theory, and their implications for contemporary capitalism.

·   The changing forms of the capitalist state, class power, and the political management of crisis.We particularly welcome papers that critically engage with contemporary developments through the lens of Marx’s method, that interrogate the configurations of state power and class relations, and that situate political economy within the wider capitalist social relations.