Book manuscript workshop on The Competitive Constraint: The Philosophical Foundations of Class Solidarity 

Challenges to Democratic Representation and the OZSW study group in political philosophy are jointly organizing a book symposium on Lillian Cicerchia’s (Amsterdam) draft manuscript The Competitive Constraint: The Philosophical Foundations of Class Solidarity. 

Date: January 19, 2024

Location: REC Building, Roeterseiland Campus, University of Amsterdam.

Registration: Due to limited space, registration is required. Employees and students from OZSW institutions will be prioritized. Please register at u.aytac@uu.nl

Blurb: This book reconstructs an argument for class solidarity as a basis for overcoming all forms of domination. According to the currently dominant theoretical framework, which I call radical liberalism, class is one axis of exclusion and inequality that operates alongside others, such as race and gender. In popular debates, activists and observers debate the relative priority of the race, class, and gender on this basis. The book challenges the foundations of this entire position by showing how class domination produces difference, such as racial and gender divisions – and so how a politics of class solidarity is necessary to overcome them. The central normative claim of the book is that class solidarity is justified as a means of resisting a special kind of structural domination that reinforces other kinds. This book develops this claim via a novel theory of that kind of domination, which occurs when (1) market competition distributes capacities for collective action unequally in and beyond the workplace and (2) a group has shared vulnerability to another group’s exercise of arbitrary power. From this perspective, class solidarity is a political solution to the problem of racial and gender differences insofar as the solution requires collective action. And what emerges from it, rather than irresolvable antagonism, is a shared horizon of freedom.

Program:

11:00-11:45       Chapters 1-2: Radical Liberalism and Rethinking What’s Wrong with “The Economy”

12:00-12:45       Chapters 4-5: Structural Domination and Contours of Class Conflict

—Lunch break—

14:00-14:45       Chapter 3: From Exploitation to Domination

15:00-15:45       Chapter 6: Is Capitalism Systematically Racist?

16:00-16:45       Chapter 7: Where Are the Independent Women?

17:00-17:45       Chapter 8: The Fact of Solidarity

Commentators

Dorothea Gädeke (Utrecht)

Steven Klein (KCL)

Tatiana Llaguno Nieves (Groningen)

Enzo Rossi (Amsterdam)

Titus Stahl (Groningen)

Nicholas Vrousalis (EUR)