Marxists have long been critical of the ossified binaries of war and peace, the exception and the ordinary, and the lawful and the unlawful governing liberal legal and capitalist system. This critique goes beyond Carl von Clausewitz’s formula that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”, reconceiving “interstate war” and revealing how capitalism has always been deeply interwoven with multiple wars -class, race, and sex wars- essential to capital accumulation across both crises and calmer periods on a global scale. Karl Marx described capitalism’s history as “written in … letters of blood and fire” marked by double colonization: “internal colonization” in the European continent and extra-European colonization. This history entails uneven capital accumulation along with racialized and gendered division of labour grounded in wars of conquest, genocide, land, and resource plunder, and destruction of indigenous knowledges and ways of life. In Rosa Luxemburg’s frame, war and violence are central to primitive accumulation, continuously fueling class, race, and gender conflicts as part of capital’s ongoing expansion.
War drives and directs configuration of capital: Rosa Luxemburg noted during Wold War I that the extraordinary technical development and destructiveness of war instruments are a corollary of advanced industrial capitalism. Far from spontaneous, war emerges from crises brewing with “peaceful” capitalist accumulation, hastening capitalism’s consolidation by fostering finance capital and new areas for accumulation and technological innovation. The plans of ‘Reconstruction’ for Gaza point to how genocide can be combined with plans for post war real estate development.
Liberal Euro-American Law treats war unevenly: some wars are seen as just, bringing civilization, democracy, and progress with implications on who can be killed, what can be destroyed, and how; while other wars such as colonial wars against “barbarians” could be unlimited and genocidal yet still justified as part of the historical progress of capital, its “creative destruction.”
On the other hand, war also sparks enduring antiwar, anti-fascist, socialist, and communist movements that challenge capitalist-nationalist orders and seek solidarity beyond state-centric peace politics. These moments have potential to create alternative understanding of peace and crystallize transformative strategies, exemplified by socialist and communist shifts around World War I amid imperialist rivalries and political strife, as seen in thinkers like Luxemburg, Kollontai, Zetkin, and Lenin.
Current wars and “peace” processes in Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Bosnia call for deep analysis of how war, capital, law, and peace intersect—examining destructive war technologies, capital accumulation, legal frameworks that enable violence or impunity, and the legacies of global antiwar solidarity.
We invite contributions on -but not limited to- the following themes.
– Marxian theories of war and peace focusing on primitive accumulation, imperialism, colonialism, genocide, fascism
– Critical analyses of ongoing conflicts and “peace” deals from political-economic and legal perspectives including issues of tribunals, war crimes, corporate crimes, transitional justice, and states of exception.
– International antiwar movements (past and present) with their potentials and challenges.
Historical Materialism Istanbul 2026 