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Nuestro compañero Luca Carrubba participará en la conferencia internacional ‘Historical Materialism Barcelona 2019’, un encuentro que, en palabras de sus organizadores, pretende «crear una red transversal, pluralista y heterogénea de investigadoras y militantes que trabajan a favor de la emancipación y la transformación social».

Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory es una revista trimestral editada en Londres. Organiza una conferencia anual en Londres cada mes de noviembre, que ya va por la decimoquinta edición. La red internacional de Historical Materialism ha organizado también conferencias en New York, Sydney, Toronto, Montreal, Roma, Beirut y Delhi. Este 2019 hay previstas conferencias en Londres, Atenes, New York, Montreal y, por primera vez, en Barcelona.

Esta primera edición de #HistoricalMaterialismBCN contará con hasta 12 ejes de trabajo con los que «pensar la emancipación» y en los que abordar «radicalidades y movimientos sociales en un mundo polarizado» durante unas jornadas que pretenden romper muros y construir nuevos puentes emancipadores entre el mundo académico y el activismo, entre teoría y práctica.

Así, Carrubba participará en el eje Clases, nuevos sujetos y nuevas formas de explotación con la conferencia «‘Game workers unite’ how alternative gaming culture is promoting unionization in the videogame industry».

“Game workers unite” how alternative gaming culture is promoting unionization in the videogame industry:

This paper address the topic of the emerging of unionism in the context of global video games industry and its relation with the Indy games and #altgames movement. I approach the videogame industry focusing on their relations within advanced capitalism. Based on the concept of capitalism ideal commodity proposed by Martyn Lee and its subsequent application to the videogame industry proposed by Kline and others, the videogame is presented as a paradigmatic commodity and media of post-Fordism era. In this context, the relationship between leisure and work is radically transformed and video games embody it becoming what Dyer-Whiteford and De Peteur define as Games of Empire, applying the post-Marxist analysis from Negri and Hardt to the culture of production, distribution and consumption within the videogame industry. In this context, leisure becomes a productive act, while playing is presented as the highest point of convergence between regimes of production that intervene in all fields of life. The expansion of video games as a commodity of the post-Fordist era, together with the so-called «democratization» of digital production media, have generated new conditions of access to the industry for social and political subjectivities that had historically been excluded from the industry itself. Since 2008, marginal actors – especially by race, gender and social class – have managed to enter the video game industry, being part of this movement called indy. In the dialectic relation between mainstream and indy modes of production, it is possible to highlight a process of special political resistance that since 2015 takes the name of #altgames movement. This movement, revindicating digital creation as personal production, the DIY approach, videogame as experience capable of generating empathy and inclusión, becomes a network of artists and creators especially coming from the LGBTIA+ community capable of articulating a process of political organization within the same industry. The new way of conceiving video games, accompanied by the special subjectivity of class, race and gender, brought by these new actors to the videogame industry, make possible the beginning of a broader process of social organization that will give life to the industry’s first North American union. Game Workers Unite is the first attempt of unionism made by the same workers in the United States and other European countries thanks to the activism of these marginalized industry actors. The paper concludes focusing on the reactions that the proposal of unionization got from the video games workers and community, and the challenges that Game Workers Unites is facing in the US and in the other international chapters born after its creation.