Join us for an author-meets-critics book talk at LSE for Søren Mau's Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (Verso, 2023).
Mau will present the main arguments of the book before engaging in a conversation with three esteemed LSE professors: Sumi Madhok, Sara Salem, and Paul Apostolidis. The event is chaired by Lukas Slothuus.
The book presents a new Marxist theory of the abstract and impersonal forms of power in capitalism, focusing on 'mute compulsion' as distinct from ideology or domination as the only forms of power in capitalism.
Meet our speakers and chair:
Dr Søren Mau (@sorenmau) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas at Aarhus University, Denmark, where he is working on the research project ‘A Philosophical Anthropology for the Capitalocene’, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. Mau is a communist philosopher who specialises in Marxist theory.
Professor Paul Apostolidis (@apostopc) is Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Government at LSE. Apostolidis specialises in critical theory and integrating empirical inquiry into methods of political theory. A major arm of his research derives insights for critiques of capitalism and racial domination from fieldwork with Latinx migrant workers’ organisations and communities in the western United States.
Professor Sumi Madhok (@sumi_madhok) is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies in the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. Madhok is a feminist political theorist with an ethnographic sensibility. She is an anticolonial, transnational and an interdisciplinary scholar, and her teaching and scholarship lie at the intersection of feminist political theory and philosophy, coloniality, transnational activism and social movements, rights/human rights, citizenship, developmentalism and feminist ethnographies.
Dr Sara Salem (@saramsalem) is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at LSE. Salem specialises in political sociology, postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, feminist theory, and global histories of empire and imperialism. Her work explores the connections between postcolonial theory and Marxism, with special attention to the context of Egypt and the period of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century.
Dr Lukas Slothuus (@lslothuus)is a Fellow in the LSE100 Department at LSE. Slothuus is a political theorist focusing on the conditions and possibilities of emancipation today, as the liberation from the social unfreedoms of exploitation and domination. His published research deals with the role and responsibilities of theorists and intellectuals in contributing to social change, as well as the norms and principles along which such critique should be developed.
More about this event:
This event is generously sponsored by LSE100 (@TheLSECourse), LSE’s flagship interdisciplinary course in which all undergraduates get the opportunity to grapple with the most pressing societal questions of our time: how to control artificial intelligence, how to build a fair society, and how to avert climate catastrophe.
Event hashtag: #LSEMau