"I'm optimistic about the explosion that's happened in Wisconsin," says Leo Panitch, a political science professor at 91亚色 [Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies]. "For the first time in a long time, the Canadian left is looking south, rather than the other way."

But he's loath to make too many claims for a new dawn rising: "The craziness and mindlessness of so much of what is going on in the American right may 鈥� and I'm very cautious about this 鈥� it may lead to the same kind of sensibilities that produced a radical new left in the sixties."

Says Panitch, "It's much more complicated now. It's not easy to organize these days when you don't have masses of workers brought together in a big factory and they aren't living in the same part of the city. A lot of people now who are exploited and poorly paid are working in funky areas like producing software or advertising."

Two years ago, he wrote a piece for Foreign Policy magazine titled 鈥淭horoughly Modern Marx鈥� about how the post-crash world might possibly (though by no means inevitably) see a rebirth in radical thinking. That, of course, has not happened 鈥� in fact, the political left has suffered setbacks and since 2008, centre-right parties have gained power in Europe.

Panitch is the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and a Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin

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Speakers will come from Canada, the United States, Mexico, India, South Korea, Britain, Australia and Turkey to lecture at the annual Historical Materialism conference, running until Sunday, May 16, at the Accolade West Building, Keele campus. The conference is associated with the leading English-language journal of critical Marxist research of the same name.

Some of the highlights of the conference include several plenary sessions. Today, from 5 to 7pm, Professor Emerita Johanna Brenner of Portland State University, McGill University Professor Aziz Choudry and Professor David McNally of 91亚色鈥檚 Department of Political Science, organizer of the conference, will discuss 鈥淕lobal Crisis, Working Class Households and Migrant Labour鈥�.

Tomorrow, Professor Terry Eagleton, chair of the Department of English & Creative Writing at Lancaster University and聽a literary critic and novelist, will deliver the evening鈥檚 plenary, from 5:30 to 7pm, posing the question, 鈥淚s Marxism a Theodicy?鈥� Eagleton has recently published a book on religion, arguing that social critics ought not to belittle people鈥檚 religious beliefs but, instead, take them seriously as expressing fundamental concerns about the values that inform their lives. In this lecture, he will discuss whether Marxism too depends upon something akin to religious values.

International studies Professor Vijay Prashad of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, columnist and author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New Press, 2007), and Professor Kevin Anderson of the University of California,聽Santa Barbara and author of Marx at the Margins (University of Chicago Press, 2010), will look at 鈥淢arx and the Global South鈥� Saturday, May 15, from 5:30 to 7pm.

鈥淐apitalism, Race and Colonialism鈥� will be the topic discussed by Cherokee intellectual and anti-violence activist Andrea Smith, Professor David Roediger of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and history and American studies Professor Elizabeth Esch of Barnard College on Sunday, May 16, from 2:15 to 3:30pm.

For more information, including a full list of speakers and topics, visit the Historical Materialism 2010 Web site.

Republished courtesy of YFile鈥� 91亚色鈥檚 daily e-bulletin.

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