Subsumption Working Group
The Subsumption Working Group is an international collaboration of scholars dedicated to developing emerging critical vocabularies for environmental humanities under conditions of ecological collapse.
Our group explores how environmental media and infrastructure studies can contribute to and inform debates on technological change, environmental struggle and the political economy of climate transition. We have met monthly over the past year to read and discuss emerging work in the fields of media and infrastructure studies, geography and Marxist theory.
Orienting our group has been an attention to the categories of formal and real subsumption as dynamic categories in Marxist thought. Through these concepts we have explored a wide variety of issues including technology, scale and transition; economic power, colonialism and state violence; social reproduction and gender; nature, production and the labor process; counterrevolution and capture.
In June 2024, our efforts converged at a roundtable at the Marxist Literary Group conference, which was convened in Montreal by the Institute on Culture and Society.
The Subsumption Working Group is convened by Hannah Tollefson, Burç Köstem and Jordan Kinder.
Members include: Darin Barney, Thomas Lamarre: Fintan Calpin (King's College London).
Past Readings
Ross, Kristin (2024) The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life www.versobooks.com/en-ca/products/3223-the-commune-form
Malm, Andreas (2016) Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming Ch. 13 “The Energy Basis of Bourgeois Property Relations”
Hanieh, Adam (2021) “Petrochemical Empire. The Geo-Politics of Fossil-Fuelled Production,” New Left Review NLR 130, July August https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii130/articles/petrochemical-empire
Chavez, Nick and Phil Neel "Forest and Factory: The Science Fiction of Communism" Endnotes https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/forest-and-factory
Briziarelli, M. (2024). Supersuming Subsumption: Theory and Politics. www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-series/supersuming-subsumption-theory-and-politics/
Banoub, D., Bridge, G., Bustos, B., Ertör, I., González-Hidalgo, M., & de los Reyes, J. A. (2021). Industrial dynamics on the commodity frontier: Managing time, space and form in mining, tree plantations and intensive aquaculture. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(4), 1533-1559. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620963362
Andrés Saenz de Sicilia, 'Subsumption', Sage Handbook of Marxism eds. Beverly Skeggs, Sara Farris, Alberto Toscano. Sage. 609-630. https://nul.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/152/1/SAGE-SKEGGS_ET_AL_Chp33_1pp.pdf
Beverly Best, 2011. 'Wages for Housework Redux: Social Reproduction and the Utopian Dialectic of the Value-form'. Theory & Event 24(4), 896-921. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/819562
Marx, Karl. ca. 1863-66. “Results of the Immediate Process of Production.” Appendix to Capital, vol. 1. Selected sections, pp. 1019-38.
Andrés Saenz de Sicilia, 'Subsumption', Sage Handbook of Marxism eds. Beverly Skeggs, Sara Farris, Alberto Toscano. Sage. 609-630.
Bernes, Jasper. 2018. “Belly of the Revolution: Agriculture, Energy and the Future of Communism”. In Materialism and the Critique of Energy. Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti eds. Chicago: MCM Publishing, pp. 331-375. https://www.mcmprime.com/files/Materialism_Energy.pdf
Beverly Best, 2011. 'Wages for Housework Redux: Social Reproduction and the Utopian Dialectic of the Value-form'. Theory & Event 24(4), 896-921. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/819562
Boyd, William, et al. 2001. “Industrial Dynamics and the Problem of Nature.” Society and Natural Resources, 14: 555–570 https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920120686
Clover, Joshua. 2018. “Subsumption and Crisis”. In Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Eds. Beverly Best and Chris O’Kane. Sage Publishing: London. Pages 1567-1583. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526436122
Day, Iyko. 2022. “Ecocriticism and Primitive Accumulation,” in After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century. Lye, Colleen, and Christopher Nealon, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108776523.
Endnotes Collective. 2010. “The History of Subsumption”. Misery and the Value Form. https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-history-of-subsumption
Hall, Rebecca Jane. 2016. “Reproduction and Resistance.” Historical Materialism 24 (2): 87–110. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-12341473.
Mau, Søren. 2023. Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. London & New York: Verso.
Oksala, Johanna. 2018. “Feminism, Capitalism and Ecology.” Hypatia 33 n2 (Spring 2018): 216-234. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12395
Saito, Kohei. 2023. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108933544.
Smith, Neil. 2007. “Nature as Accumulation Strategy”, Socialist Register: Coming to Terms with Nature. https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/issue/view/444
Toscano, Alberto. 2011. “Logistics and Opposition.” Mute Magazine, August 9, 2011. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/logistics-and-opposition
—. 2014. “Lineaments of the Logistical State.” Viewpoint Magazine, September 28, 2014. https://viewpointmag.com/2014/09/28/lineaments-of-the-logistical-state/.