Focuses
The research of the Centre for Social Critique at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin is focused on the interconnected crises of capitalism and democracy. Within this research field, the Centre chooses an annual topic which guides its theoretical work and public activites.
Focus of the year
The Colors of Capitalism 2024–2025
The proclamation of human and civil rights, which should put an end to servitude, accompanied the bourgeois revolutions. These revolutions dissolved some of the pre-capitalist relations of dependency, such as serfdom and hereditary debt bondage, and fundamentally transformed others, such as patriarchal rule. The universalistic scope of rights also set in motion a political dynamic that—as the Communist Manifesto puts it—sweeps away all fixed, fast-frozen relations and melts all that is solid into air. For the first time in history, social movements emerged from this dynamic that were explicitly committed to the liberation of workers and women, to the fight against colonialism, racism as well as numerous more exclusions and forms of exploitation.
All Focuses
Social Transformation 2022 - 2023
The times they are a-changinʼ—the world is changing. Change has been coming and happening for quite some time, and in most parts of the world it has been accompanied by crises carrying existential threats for the vast majority of the local populations. Now, however, even in the global centres of prosperity a “turning point” is being proclaimed because overlapping crises are exacerbating each other as they come together. The word “turning point” is still used as a defensive spell to prevent the changes already impacting most of the world from also having a massive effects where decision-making power and prosperity accumulate. But at the same time, the proclamation of the “turning point” also calls for a fundamental restructuring of Western societies, including drastic “impositions:” [Y]ou better start swimminʼ or you’ll sink like a stone.
Structures of Domination 2021 -2022
Domination has many faces. So many that it becomes dubious what connects all these instances in which humans dominate, oppress, exploit, subjugate, disrespect, humiliate, discriminate against (and the list could go on and on) other human beings. The concrete engagement with the various forms of domination has helped society to recognize them and to strengthen the struggles against them. However, these concrete engagements provided no answer to the connection and relation of all the various forms. Today, attempts to bracket all the experiences of domination, oppression, etc. are rather abstract and lifeless. They are in particular unable to grasp the contrary forces that hinder the struggles against different forms of domination to unite in one great stream that washes away domination as such.