What's the point of conjunctural analysis?
Abstract
With conjunctural approaches to urban research fast proliferating, along with the compounding crises they seek to study, now's the time to ask: what's the point of conjunctural analysis? Its purpose, I argue, is to offer a method for identifying points of condensation of crisis and contradiction within the social totality of planetary colonial capitalism, with a view to providing practical pointers on how to begin to exploit those moments for strategic intervention. This makes conjunctural analysis a distinctive, praxis-oriented mode of historical materialism – understood as an open, relational and holistic critical theory encompassing feminist, postcolonial and ecological perspectives, and alert to multiple social relations of domination, of exploitation and appropriation, notably gender, race and ecology as well as class. What conjunctural analysis adds to the two main methods of historical materialism – one apprehending capital's necessary form; the other capitalism's historical formation – is a more strategic and speculative orientation to social change as this emerges through contestation at pressure points in contradictory social formations, to assist in praxis, in the rearticulation of these formations for emancipatory ends. To that end, I attempt to provide conjunctural analysis with an epistemological grounding in dialectical relations between subjectivity and objectivity, totality and particularity, thought and history, past and future – a means to understand where, how and why to look for the conjuncture. The article concludes with suggestions on what such a vision for conjunctural analysis might mean for urban research through considering urban applications of conjunctural thinking.
Introduction
Conjunctural thinking arguably first cohered as a distinctive approach to social critique the last time the imperial core witnessed multiple crises coalescing to produce instability, uncertainty, challenge and opportunity. That moment was the late 1970s, when the postwar Fordist-Keynesian settlement was coming apart at the seams, contested by progressive new social movements as well as reactionary forces on the rise. In Britain, a collective led by Stuart Hall and associated with the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies made a seminal intervention that inaugurated the conjunctural as a unique mode of analysis (Hall et al., 2013). Published in 1978, Policing the Crisis examined the moral panic whipped up by the right-wing press and opportunistic politicians around a racialised urban mugging incident in Birmingham for clues and insights into the contradictory fusion of ascendant neoliberal individualism with what its authors named ‘authoritarian populism’ – anticipating Thatcherism well before Thatcher gained power. This did for authoritarian neoliberalism what Gramsci had done previously for fascism in the 1930s – each a conjunctural analysis of passive revolutions from above for maintaining hegemony under strain from below (see also Hart, 2024). And it grounded the conjuncture in an urban situation of the sort that urban studies attends to – the ‘ghetto’ of Handsworth – whilst still treading the line (often levelled at conjunctural analysis) of methodological nationalism, in beginning from ‘a crisis of and for British capitalism’ (Hall et al., 2013: 118, 310), as co-author John Clarke has more recently explored (Clarke, 2023: 13–31).
Several decades later, amidst the intersecting crises condensing in the 2008 global financial implosion, Hall's collaborations with Doreen Massey in journals such as Soundings (Hall and Massey, 2010), alongside Massey's abiding focus on articulation, complementing Hall's (see Clarke, 2018; Lorne et al., 2026), did much to seed conjunctural thinking in geography as well as urban studies more broadly.1 This deeply relational and political conception of the conjuncture built upon work in this register initiated by Gramsci (1971), and extended by Hall (1986) – a register adapted for geography through Gillian Hart's dialectical-relational approach to understanding global conjunctures as ‘major turning points when interconnected forces at multiple levels, domains, and spatial scales in different regions of the world come together to generate new conditions with worldwide implications and reverberations’ (Hart, 2024: 151). Here, socio-spatial change is produced, in Gramsci's (1971) terms, by relations of force at various levels – social, political, military – from urban and national-popular movements to imperial manoeuvrings between nation-states (see also Hart, 2024: 148; Hart, 2006, 2018, 2020). Politics is front and centre in these approaches to the conjuncture. Indeed, the point is to change it.
Such geographical interpretations helped prepare the ground for the current efflorescence of conjunctural approaches in urban studies, reflecting renewed interest across the critical social sciences and humanities since 2008 – the beginning of 'the end of the end of history' (Hochuli et al., 2021) – a popularity signalled by Adam Tooze's recent foray into ‘“working the contradictory, stony ground of the present conjuncture” – a “conversation” with Hall, Massey and Peck’ (as the title of #384 of his Substack the Chartbook puts it). A sensibility ever central to cultural studies (Gilbert, 2019), conjunctural analysis is now being rapidly translated, interpreted and applied, from diverse epistemological perspectives, across critical geography and urban studies – so much so that Davidson and Ward (2024: 517) have recently speculated about a ‘fully fledged “conjunctural turn”’, albeit caveated as a turn ‘we are still short of’. As well as ‘conjunctural urbanism’ (Peck, 2017) and ‘conjunctural (inter and intra) urban comparison’ (Leitner and Sheppard, 2020), we now have ‘conjunctural urban geographies’ (Davidson and Ward, 2024) and ‘conjunctural economic geographies’ (Pickles and Smith, 2016), ‘conjunctural cities’ (Sayın et al., 2022) and ‘conjunctural municipalism’ (Thompson et al., 2025). With such conjunctural approaches to urban research fast proliferating, along with the compounding crises they seek to study – but with conjunctural analysis itself proving notoriously enigmatic, resistant to methodological codification (Peck, 2024) – now's the time to ask, as Jeremy Gilbert (2019: 15) has done for cultural studies: ‘what, ultimately, is the point of all this?’
Such a question seems especially pertinent to ask at this point in the journey of conjunctural analysis – to clarify directions of travel – when the difficult yet invaluable task of codifying conjunctural methodologies is already well underway, with methodological rules of thumb and welcome guidance for actually doing conjunctural urban research articulated by Jamie Peck, Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard (Leitner et al., 2019; Leitner and Sheppard, 2020; Peck, 2017, 2023, 2024; Sheppard et al., 2024). Here, conjunctural analysis is presented as the missing mediating link in epistemological dualisms between general and particular, macro-forces and micro-processes, totalising explanation and contextualising difference. Peck's (2017) conceptual development of ‘conjunctural urbanism’ emanated organically from reading the conjunctural terrain itself, from régulationist research into neoliberalisation as a mutating mode of regulation in crisis, expressed in symptoms of urban fiscal crisis and austerity in the post-2008 conjuncture (see, for instance, Peck, 2013). Yet it can also be understood as a methodological response to the counterproductive and demobilising deadlock in which urban studies found itself in a series of long-running and over-heated debates, from the locality debate (Massey, 1991) and assemblage vs critical urban theory (Brenner et al., 2011) to global urban comparison (Peck, 2015), from planetary urbanisation (Goonewardena, 2018) to planetary gentrification (see Wyly, 2022: 67–69).
It is only within this very particular disciplinary context of longstanding epistemological divides that the recent uptake of conjunctural analysis in urban studies and geography is at all explicable: assigned a bridge-building role as mediator of polarised positions. Indeed, Sayın et al. (2022), in introducing ‘conjunctural cities’, suggest that Peck ‘utilises the idea of “conjunctural urbanism” as shorthand for overcoming what he sees as the “deconstructive manoeuvres” (Peck, 2015: 160) preventing constructive dialogue across different theoretical perspectives’. Likewise, Ward et al. (2024: 319) infer that ‘[c]onjunctural analysis has gained momentum in recent years, in part as scholars attempt to develop a more global, relational urban studies which does not unreflexively universalise theoretical constructs generated in Global North sites’.
At stake in these debates is the question of what gets seen and what made invisible in narrating and understanding urban change from particular positionalities, the role and relative power of theory in shaping the process of knowledge production, and the reproduction of power relations entailed by that process. Put crudely, dominant streams of Marxism, critical realism and regulation theory have been held accountable for masculinist, essentialising and totalising tendencies – for their purported structuralism, Eurocentrism, reproduction of northern dominance, and blindness to difference, locality, culture and agency – with concomitant calls for pluralising, provincialising and de-essentialising theory from various epistemological vantages ranging across postcolonialism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, southern urbanism, feminism and assemblage theory (see Peck, 2015). Such critiques mounted an important defence of ‘reading for difference’, particularity, otherness and emergence in the face of an apparently analytically reductive, hegemony-reinforcing and self-defeating ‘reading for dominance’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006). In response, their interlocutors defended dialectics and the notion of totality – the interrelation of part and whole; a ‘context of contexts’ (see Brenner et al., 2011) – to make particularities explicable beyond their bounded otherness and, moreover, to retain the explanatory and emancipatory power – and prevent the demobilisation – of critical urban theory. These positions became increasingly polarised and caricatured, such that meaningful dialogue became all but impossible.
Finding common ground between such polarised positions provided one motivating rationale, I would argue, for translating conjunctural thinking into a workable methodology for doing more reflexive case study research, sensitive to both theoretical explanation and contextual difference. The stage was set for urban conjunctural analysis to become a spatialised rendition of Michael Burawoy's (2009) ‘extended case method’, whose ‘reflexive ethnography’ deeply informs the ‘conjunctural methodologies’ and ‘injunctions’ formulated by Peck, Leitner and Sheppard (Leitner et al., 2019; Peck, 2023, 2024; Sheppard et al., 2024). What Burawoy's extended case method is for sociology and ethnography, conjunctural analysis is fast becoming for geography and urban research. This is conjunctural analysis illuminated and revealed as social-scientific method: a welcome clarification of reflexive, critical and emancipatory urban methodologies.
In this article, I seek to further extend and develop conjunctural methodologies for urban studies by first digging beneath such methodological renderings to reveal their underlying epistemological foundations, in historical materialism, and then building on these foundations to strengthen their political praxis dimensions. The article was partly inspired by a recent epistemological split that has emerged within urban conjuncturalism between what Burawoy would term ‘reflexive’ and ‘positive’ science approaches, with Davidson and Ward (2024) arguing for an ‘empiricist’ and ‘rationalist’ mode explicitly divorced from the ‘critical’ and ‘normative’ orientations of Gramsci and Hall which animate the reflexive approaches of Peck, Leitner, Sheppard and fellow travellers. In this argument for an empiricist and rationalist mode, conjunctural analysis gets reinterpreted as an assemblage-like ‘situational analysis’, a method for producing impartial, ‘objective’ knowledge of conjunctures understood as aggregations of contingently-related parts into an ‘urban composite’ – a position I argue to be politically demobilising and epistemologically blind to the ontologically dialectical relations between subject and object, whose separation through capitalist social relations both enables and is upheld by such a position. Davidson and Ward's (2024) scientific take on conjunctural analysis is thus caught within the very ideological coordinates of capitalism from which it seeks objective distance.
My argument is that conjunctural analysis is a method not only for doing more effective case study research and extending our understanding of social processes, for which it contains great potential. Rather, its distinctive contribution to critical urban studies resides in its capacity to mobilise an additional, complementary method to Marx's two main methods, as a stream of praxis flowing from within historical materialism and outward beyond, as a marxism without guarantees (Hall, 1983; on its historical materialist origins, see Koivisto and Lahtinen, 20062012). If the first marxist method is to apprehend the functional operation of capital as a logical form – to ascertain its being – and the second is to trace the genesis of capitalism as a concrete social formation articulated with other relations of hierarchy and domination, not least ecology, gender and race – its historical becoming (Bieler and Morton, 2024: 6) – then the third, conjunctural method is a more practical, strategic and speculative orientation to contestation and social change as it emerges at crisis points in this contradictory social formation, in media res, to assist in political action, in praxis.
The point of conjunctural analysis, then, as I argue below, is to articulate the stitching points in capitalism as a contradictory formation – a social fabric ‘coming apart at the seams’ (Hall et al., 2013: 1) – in ways that make its unravelling and rearticulation more politically practical. This draws on dialectical thinking (Hart, 2020; Ollman, 2003) to understand capitalism as an open, unfolding, always-becoming social totality (Goonewardena, 2018), whose becoming is shaped by crisis and contestation, contingency and difference. Importantly, this makes difference, culture and particularity central concerns of analysis – the keys, in fact, to unlocking conjunctural openings in that totality. And it makes for an integral theory of the internal connections between all forms of difference and relations of domination through an open totality that resists being deterministic, essentialising or capitalocentric: for a refusal of the separation, division and fragmentation of knowledge production in the commodified academy and in everyday life (see Lefebvre, 2002: 180–193).
In what follows, I aim to provide an epistemological grounding to the methodological manoeuvres that Peck, Leitner and Sheppard usefully initiate for conjunctural urban studies – understood as a ‘reflexive’, not ‘positive’, social science in Burawoy's terms and which, following Hart (2024), foregrounds political praxis as the ultimate purpose. Mobilising Marx's dialectical method – and specifically Hall's (2003) interpretation of the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse – I navigate in epistemological terms a distinctly historical materialist stream of conjunctural thinking as it runs from Marx through Gramsci to Hall and beyond. Conjunctural thinking finds its distinctive contribution to urban studies, or any discipline, as a strategic way into apprehending and politically challenging the historical unfolding of objective totality from a particular subjective standpoint. If Marx's method is about critiquing capitalist totality from various dialectical vantage points, one of these is conjunctural.
To make this case, I draw on a rich body of work which connects Gramscian geography (Ekers et al., 2012) and Hart's (2018) ‘postcolonial Marxism’ with the distinctly anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and ecological Marxist approach to the urban question charted by Stefan Kipfer and Kanishka Goonewardena, alongside fellow travellers such as Ayyaz Mallick (Goonewardena, 2018; Kipfer, 2023; Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2013; Kipfer and Mallick, 2022).2 This has emerged through what Kipfer describes as an ‘open-ended’ and ‘integral’ conception of marxism (Camp, 2025) that convenes dialogue between, and theoretically synthesises, principally three thinkers: Gramsci, Lefebvre, Fanon (Ekers et al., 2012; Goonewardena et al., 2008; Kipfer, 2023). Such a dialogue makes for a theory – and praxis – of the production of space that refracts world-historical imperial and colonial relations through the affect, language and ideology of urban everyday life. And it makes for an open, dynamic and reflexive conception of totality (Goonewardena, 2018) as a social formation of articulated relations, fusing class, gender, race, nationality, sexuality and ecology into what Marx (1973) and Hall (2003) would call a ‘differentiated unity’. The point of conjunctural analysis, it follows, is to tease apart this differentiated unity at the pressure points of condensed contradictions and antagonisms that precipitate conjunctural crises, and to articulate strategic and tactical ways for subaltern groups to turn such crises into political opportunities for disrupting and shaping that open totality.
I bring this open, integral and spatialised approach to marxism into conversation with materialist eco-feminist, world-ecological, value-form and social reproduction theory to help understand how capitalism is dependent on uncommodified spaces through the enrolment of the unpaid work and energies of women, colonies and nature (Mies, 1986), increasingly underpinned by personal forms of domination (Carson, 2024), whose shifting uneven development, unequal exchange and colonial boundaries with commodified zones creates the ‘boundary struggles’ (Fraser, 2022) that contest such dominations when crises periodically erupt or are politically condensed. Such stitches in the articulation of totality might provide a methodological entry-point for – contra Lorne et al. (2024) – identifying more precisely where to ‘look’ for conjunctural crises: epistemological principles for understanding when, where and why the ‘situations’ that Sheppard et al. (2024) point to are ‘politically salient’ or, indeed, ‘urgent’ for conjunctural analysis.
The article concludes by considering the implications for critical urban studies, with some promising examples of entry-points for conjunctural urban research along these lines. In doing so, it seeks both to contribute to recent efforts to think together the terrains of the conjunctural and the urban – from various positions within the totality of uneven planetary urbanisation (Cowan, 2025; Thompson et al., 2025: 52–54) – and to sketch out, in empirical and conceptual terms, the urban contours of emergent strategic geographies (Halvorsen, 2025).
Part 1: where to look for the conjuncture?
As conjunctural analysis makes its mark on urban studies, the question remains where to ‘look’ for the conjuncture (Lorne et al., 2024); what ‘place to start?’ (Peck, 2023). While much has been written recently on how to ‘do’ conjunctural analysis, with ‘rules of thumb’ and methodological ‘injunctions’ attempting to pin down and codify in social-scientific terms this notoriously elusive ‘critical ethos or “craft” practice’ (Leitner et al., 2019; Peck, 2024: 463; Sheppard et al., 2024), such methodological unpacking tends to explain the process of doing conjunctural analysis once launched – tracing connections and relations ‘wherever they happen to lead’ (Peck, 2024). Far less attention, however, has been given to the motivating rationale for where to begin and how to start – ‘what point of entry, where to cut in, how to engage’ (Peck, 2023: 1569) – or, indeed, why do it in the first place.
In a recent response to Peck's intervention in Dialogues in Human Geography on ‘practicing conjunctural methodologies’, Lorne et al. (2024) suggest that ‘[o]ne of the strengths – and challenges – of conjunctural thinking lies in trying to get to grips with multiple crises without already knowing precisely where to look’. My contention in this paper is that, despite the complexity of conjunctural crises, we nonetheless can find ways of knowing where to look and where to begin. ‘But the question of where to look’, write Lorne et al. (2026), ‘also confronts us with a profoundly geographical challenge: what are the spaces of the present conjuncture?’ Such a question requires at least some knowledge of where to look, what to look for and why – an epistemological challenge I take up in this paper.
The second of six injunctions detailed in Sheppard et al.'s (2024) encyclopaedia entry on ‘conjunctural analysis’ suggests that it begins with ‘prioritizing moments, sites, and circumstances of social significance and political urgency, opening spaces for ‘mid-level’ theorizing that are positioned between abstract tendencies and concrete complexity, while refusing to disengage from either’. Elsewhere, Peck (2024: 462–463) suggests we begin with ‘politically salient’ or ‘politically active “situations”, critical junctures, unfolding crises, or problem spaces’. Yet, the question remains how we might identify and interpret such ‘problem spaces’ – what kind of problems are we talking about? Similarly, what dynamics and movements of forces and processes shape such ‘unfolding crises’ and, therefore, determine why they are politically ‘active’ or ‘salient’? Some answers are provided by Sheppard et al.'s (2024) sixth injunction: ‘Seizing upon moments of conjunctural uncertainty, when hegemony is in question, in order to develop political interventions that advance emancipatory goals and visualize alternative futures’. This is a fundamental move in conjunctural analysis – but one which many of its recent applications stop short of.
Of the conjunctural analyses now proliferating across urban research – especially in economic geography – a tendency is discernible of prioritising the second injunction over the sixth, with case studies taking ‘a relational approach attuned to navigating the tension between universality and particularism in interpreting cases’ and which ‘seek to contribute to the “restless revision” of […] midlevel theoretical formulation’ (Ward et al., 2024: 319), to ‘stress test urban theory’ (Sayın et al., 2022). While completely compatible with the injunction to develop political interventions that advance emancipatory goals and visualize alternative futures, the emphasis on theory generation, conceptual revision and disciplinary knowledge production (for comprehending socially constructed complexity) risks distracting us from the political purpose of conjunctural thinking – that is, to interpret crises as opportunities for strategically intervening in the historical unfolding of social change (Hall and Massey, 2010; Koivisto and Lahtinen, 2012). While conjuncturalism is partly about grappling with cases to reveal relationships between abstract tendencies and concrete complexity, it must be more than this to retain any distinctive identity within critical urban studies.
In many recent applications of conjunctural urban research, therefore, the point of conjunctural thinking has drifted from political diagnosis and prognosis – encapsulated by Sheppard et al.'s (2024) sixth injunction and exemplified by Policing the Crisis – towards more straightforwardly reflexive (or even positivist) social science (e.g. Liu, 2026; Sorensen, 2024). The problem to be addressed in such applications is not the strategic and tactical puzzle of how to catalyse hegemonic struggle against capitalism, nationalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, colonialism and imperialism per se, but rather the social-scientific problem of more precisely analysing shifting institutional configurations while testing mid-level concepts against empirics for theory refinement, even if these theories are aimed at emancipation from such dominations.
Stranded situational analysis and grounded theory
What happens to conjunctural analysis if Sheppard et al.'s (2024) sixth injunction is rejected entirely, along with all the political aspects of the second? Making a decisive break with all aforementioned interpretations, Davidson and Ward's (2024) ‘conjunctural urban geographies’ rids conjunctural analysis of its normative Gramscian baggage and hitches it instead to Karl Popper's ‘situational analysis’ and Charles Tilly's ‘relational analysis’, for the impartial and objective observation of the contingent assemblage of plural relations and processes into composite situations. Conjunctures are defined as ‘urban composites’ – that is, relatively composed ‘aggregates’ of actors and processes, marked by both ‘plasticity’, their relative ‘fixity and malleability’, and ‘temporality’, their dynamism and shapeshifting over time. Here, the politically charged idea of a conjuncture as a momentary condensation of contradictions afflicting the hegemonic order at multiple levels – compressed and ‘squeezed together under pressure’ to create a crisis of authority (Clarke, 2023: 2) – is dissolved within the politically diluted, anodyne social-scientific solution of the ‘situation’ (see also Thompson et al., 2025: 45–46). Conjunctural analysis thus begins to resemble sociological and historical institutionalism – framed as complementary by not dissimilar takes to Davidson and Ward's (Liu, 2026; Sorensen, 2024) – whereby conjunctures risk getting conflated with ‘critical junctures’ in the composition and decomposition of institutional assemblages. This raises questions over the distinctiveness of conjunctural approaches vis-à-vis various other forms of institutionalist and relational approaches to social science.
These difficulties pivot on an epistemological dividing line running through the social sciences – that between what Michael Burawoy (2009) termed ‘positive science’ and ‘reflexive science’. Positive science draws on positivist, empiricist and what Davidson and Ward (2024) call ‘rationalist’ traditions in the philosophy of science that posit an ‘external world’ ‘that can be construed as separate from and incommensurable with those who study it’ (Burawoy, 2009: 31). Here, the scientist-observer is distanced from the object they study, in a subject-object split that underpins the possibility of accessing ‘objective’ knowledge devoid of bias and normativity, if only the right methods and procedures are followed. This forms the basis of the reliability, replicability and representativeness of social-scientific findings that can be freed from contextual or subjective distortion. Reflexive science, by contrast, sees purely ‘objective’ knowledge of the unfolding of history as an impossibility, ‘because inescapably we live in the world we study’, and we can either deny that active entanglement, argues Burawoy (2009: 9), or embrace the tensions and contradictions and turn them to epistemological advantage.
Positive tendencies within ethnography, Burawoy (2009) suggests, have tended towards ‘grounded theory’ – theory built from the ground up; empirics speaking for themselves – and adopt a ‘pluralising’ rather than ‘totalising’ reading of relationality, in which multiple causalities are detectable without distortion by theory (Conroy, 2024a). This is what Davidson and Ward (2024; my emphasis) gesture at with their ‘rationalist/empiricist’ conception of conjunctural analysis aimed at producing ‘detailed empirical evidence’ and ‘an empirically grounded model of the functioning and evolution of the composite, before then tentatively testing explanatory theories of the findings’, to ‘safeguard against mono-causal explanations’. Yet a reflexive approach recognises that all research is necessarily informed by positionality, political bias and preconceived ideas, even if only subconsciously. Theory is not to be denied or ‘safeguarded against’, but rather put into reflexive dialogue with empirical observation, ‘continually put to the test’ and challenged through resistance, to incorporate ‘anomalies’ within expanding and deepening explanatory frameworks (Burawoy, 2009). This is exactly the task that Peck (2024) assigns to conjunctural analysis in his emphasis on stress-testing theory, drawing pointedly and repeatedly on Burawoy's reflexive approach.
Such an epistemological position on the possibility of impartial, objective and grounded empirical knowledge of the conjuncture leads to a disabling aversion to vital notions of normativity and totality. Riffing off Popper and Tilly, Davidson and Ward reject the ‘holist’ and ‘monist’ perspective of Marx, Gramsci and Hall – that is, the dialectical notion of ‘totality’ and internal relations between part and whole – to put the focus instead on the contingent interaction between individuals and processes, with no ‘pre-defined narrative’ about what constitutes relations between individuals or drives society's dynamic development. The ‘various individual and aggregate rationalities of this composite urban situation’ that Davidson and Ward (2024) ‘charge’ conjunctural analysis with ‘deciphering’ and ‘disaggregating’ are thus related only in apparently plural and contingent fashion – that is, seen to lack any differentiated unity or functional interaction that can account for such relationality. Any such relations are purely external: they connect otherwise autonomous and independent objects in seemingly random – or contingent – fashion.
Contingency is a concept leant on heavily by such ‘positive science’ readings of conjunctural analysis. Davidson and Ward (2024: 521–522; my emphasis) advocate for ‘relational approaches that push us to understand conjunctures in more contingent and less normative ways’; for understanding ‘cities [as] more than sites of hegemonic determination, and their tangled relational messiness mak[ing] determinations contingent as opposed to inevitable’. Here, normativity and inevitability are opposed – problematically – to contingency. In what follows, I draw on alternative conceptions of determination, contingency and necessity drawn epistemologically from historical materialism (and critical realism) to demonstrate how normativity – derived from subjectivity – is necessarily related to any objectivity, through the dialectical relation between subject and object, providing a scientific basis for the necessarily normative orientation of conjunctural analysis. This suggests that the very positing of an objective science free from subjectivity is itself a product of a historically specific mode of life based on disempowering and dominating separations.
Part 2: the why and how of conjunctural analysis
By using Marx's method, we can understand this separation between subjectivity and objectivity that informs objectivity-seeking empiricist/rationalist models as a historically specific phenomenon entrenched by, and generative of, capitalist social relations. Here, I draw on Capital: Volume I (Marx, 2024) and the Grundrisse (Marx, 1973) to explain how the subject and object split has come to undergird the production of scientific knowledge, and what this implies for conjunctural analysis. Through this critical deconstruction, I defend the ‘critical’ and ‘normative’ orientation rejected by Davidson and Ward (2024) as the fundamental ‘modality’ of conjunctural analysis (Hart, 2024). I do this by reconstructing the epistemological foundations that support conjunctural thinking as a mode of historical materialism alive to the dialectical relations that animate our world: subject and object, history and thought, difference and totality, past and future.
In her recently published 1987 lecture on Marx's method, Gillian Rose (2025) summarises historical materialism as essentially materialist (set against German idealist philosophy), historical (critiquing the ahistoricism of British political economy) and scientific (distinct from French utopian socialism). ‘Materialism’ is the idea that the relations of production constitute the soil in which grow all forms of social life and thought – an expansive sense of production as metabolic exchange with nature, in the ‘web of life’ (Moore, 2015). The ‘historical’ suggests that the individual producer (subject) and private property (object) are not eternal, transhistorical categories but rather historically determined. And the ‘scientific’ refers to how Marx's method was not simply a utopian positing of some ideal future, ‘but demonstrated how the possibility of that society, of a just future, lies in the contradictions of the present society’ (Rose, 2025: 4).
A clear-sighted view of conjunctural analysis is offered through these three windows: the historical; the materialist; and the scientific-utopian. First, I explain the subject-object split through the lens of the dialectic of thought and history. Second, the dialectic of part and whole, difference and totality, provides a way into identifying clearer starting points for conjunctural analysis. Finally, the dialectic of past and future is found to be the key to conjunctural analysis as a distinctively speculative, strategic and action-oriented method amongst historical materialist approaches to social change.
To understand how conjunctural analysis might provide a complementary approach to the more familiar methods of historical materialism, I reconstruct, through Stuart Hall's (2003) remarkably rich interpretation, the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse (Marx, 1973) – German for ‘sketch’ or ‘outline’ and the ‘one famous place where Marx expatiated at greater length’ the workings of his method (Rose, 2025: 8). ‘Marx's notes on method’ by Hall (2003) was originally published in 1973 as a working paper, around the same time that collective work was begun on the seminal conjunctural intervention Policing the Crisis.3 This, therefore, provides insight into not only Marx's method but Hall's own epistemology and inspiration for developing conjunctural analysis as a distinctive sensibility. In the following three sections, I elaborate a tripartite theoretical basis for critical conjunctural analysis, with a running commentary on what this means for arguments to the contrary.
Historicism: subject and object, thought and history
Marx traces the historical development of capitalism as a contradictory social formation that emerged through the generalisation of the historically unprecedented alienation between subject and object (Marx, 2024). Through violent acts of enclosure and primitive accumulation, commoners (subjects) were divorced from the means of subsistence (objects) – and capital and the wage-relation stepped into that gap, as mediator. The conditions for reproduction now appear external to the worker, beyond their control, as an abstract alienated object – the products of their labour objectified as commodities, mediated by the commodity form, made concrete as money. The notion of mediation of the relations of production – and life – therefore becomes ‘very important’ in Marx's method (Rose, 2025: 8). Social relations which under feudal and pre-capitalist formations appeared immediate and part of an organic unity now appear mediated, external and alien (Cox, 2013: 9). Objectified relations thus appear as thing-like or ‘reified’ – like money – taking on a life of their own, working behind the backs of producers cut off from the life process, compelled to sell their labour as an object to survive. This is the basis of impersonal power under capitalism that disciplines both capitalists and labourers, held together in conflictual mutual dependence.
Two developments emerge from this original alienation: reification (relations appearing thing-like); and escalating contradictions driving the emergence of a socio-spatial totality. First, reification. Marx's method ‘traces the mediation […] of immediate experience and shows that experience to be abstract, by which that means that some of the things we think we are experiencing immediately turn out to be the result of a long development’ (Rose, 2025: 8). Our immediate experience of money, for instance, or the liberal-bourgeois notion of the individual citizen with rights, makes such objects appear as given, naturalised and transhistorical, when in fact they are historically produced relations, specific to a particular mode of production. Marx's method is to unmask the real relations behind the mystifying appearances of capitalism and bourgeois ideology; to show how seemingly transhistorical objects as the ‘individual producer’ – the Robinson Crusoe of British political economy – are not the static point of departure or transhistorical axiom of analysis but rather the dynamic result of a historical process that renders subjects as separate and thing-like, obscuring their real dialectical relation.
Marx shows how certain epistemological ways of seeing the world – positivism, empiricism, rationalism, idealism – are themselves historically specific, the products of bourgeois ideology and enabling of – by sustaining the illusion of separation – the continued reproduction of capitalist relations in the service of class domination. Marx's method is to reveal the real relations between elements presented as reified entities – the individual, property, money – and then demonstrate how these phenomenal appearances are actually deeply functional to the system's maintenance and self-expansion. On that basis alone, we must ask what kind of ideological work an ‘empiricist’ and ‘rationalist’ approach to conjunctural analysis is really doing?
Marx's method troubles the notion of an ‘objective’ science of investigating conjunctural situations from an explicitly non-normative or rationalist perspective. Marx turned Hegel's dialectical method on its head to advance a materialist philosophy of mediation and internal relations that demonstrates how abstract identities posited as autonomous and standalone concepts, as objects devoid of contradiction or connection with other identities, is an impossibility, an idealist delusion (Hall, 2003; Marx, 1973). Moreover, the subject-object split entrenched by capitalism not only precipitates the reification of relations of production, but also arguably of knowledge. Money steps into the gap between worker and product; ‘science’ steps into the gap between knowing subject and studied object. Thus, bourgeois social science – positivism, rationalism, empiricism – sees the knower as somehow independent and detached from the reality they observe and measure, as externally related to their objects of knowledge, just as a worker is divorced from the means of subsistence.
This is the basis of Hegel's idealist belief in the ‘absolute autonomy’ of thought as well as positive science's notion of ‘objectivity’: ‘this constitutes an idealist problematic […] No formalist reduction – whether of the Hegelian, positivist, empiricist or structuralist variety – escapes this stricture’ (Hall, 2003). Indeed, Althusser's purported ‘epistemological break’ between the humanist, Hegelian ‘ideology’ of the young Marx and the ‘science’ of the mature Marx, is a structuralist dead-end stuck in this idealist problematic (Thomas, 2011). Against Althusser's ‘philosophy of science’, Hart (2024) advocates – building on Peter D Thomas (2011) – for Gramsci's ‘philosophy of praxis’ as the basis for any politically meaningful conjunctural analysis. Positing the scientific observer as objective is anti-democratic in its idealist delusion over the independence of thought. Dialectical thinking, however, is profoundly materialist and, even, democratic – always working through the other, through dialogue and real relations (Ollman, 2003).4
Marx saw thought and the material reality it attempts to apprehend as a ‘differentiated unity’ – each irreducible to the other, with their own inner workings, but mutually articulated through historical development. Thought is the ‘working up of observation and conception’, mediated by the thinker-observer, who is in turn mediated by the historically-produced society in which they find themselves (Hall, 2003). Or, in Burawoy's (2009: 9) words, ‘we are living history as we do research’. Knower transforms the knowable, and vice versa: thought does not reflect history impassively; it actively shapes it.
If indeed objectivity is dialectically related to subjectivity, we must reject interpretations of conjunctural analysis that posit objectivity without normativity, without a standpoint. This provides a materialist – and scientific – basis for understanding conjunctural analysis as essentially normative, political and historical. Conjunctural analysis is an especially self-conscious attempt at foregrounding this reflexive relation between thought and history, intentionally putting analysis to work in shaping history.
Materialism: totality and difference, objectivity and subjectivity
If the first development of the original alienation between subject and object is reification, the second is the opening of a deep contradiction between what Cox (2013: 9) characterises as ‘[o]bject-less subjects and objects that appear to be independent of any subjectivity: just existing as capital with their own logic beyond the control of anybody’. This sets in motion contradictions – ‘sellers without buyers and buyers without sellers; capital that remains uninvested; debts that cannot be paid; factories without raw-materials’ (Cox, 2013: 9) – causing inequality, waste, pollution, conflict, instability and periodic crisis, whose attempted resolution by the state leads only to the displacement or temporary suspension of such contradictions. These systemic disequilibria and class antagonisms provide the forward motion of history, catalysing the crisis dynamics that spill out across what becomes a socio-spatial ‘totality’ held together through increasingly planetary relations of exploitation, expropriation and extraction. In its drive for expansion, capital tends towards totalisation (Conroy, 2024a; Goonewardena, 2018; Jameson, 1988; O’Kane, 2021).
The contradictions of the subject-object split are expressed in ecological relations, too. The ‘metabolic rift’ – long-term soil fertility sacrificed for short-term productivity – is displaced and scaled up, from soil depletion to climate breakdown, from the nitrogen cycle to the carbon cycle, as successive technological subsidies attempt, in vain, to prop up ecological shortfall, producing rifts elsewhere: an escalating process of ‘rifts and shifts’ (McClintock, 2010). This confirms our shared global biophysical space-time – the geological totality of the Anthropocene or, rather, Capitalocene (Moore, 2015). The metabolic rift finds spatial expression, and exacerbation, in the town and country divide, whereby dispossessed peasants are forced into cities to supply labour for industry, their excrement pumped out to sea rather than recycled for soil replenishment, while rural land is enclosed and consolidated for intensive industrial agriculture (McClintock, 2010; Nishat-Botero and Thompson, 2025). This is an urban-rural split elaborated as the imperial core-periphery dynamics of uneven development extending across the world with the relentless colonial expansion of capitalism (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2013). The consequent consolidation of the world market thus brings about a socio-spatial totality that is open and shapeshifting, not closed or determined.
This is an important point that challenges mis-readings of totality as deterministic, mono-causal or totalitarian, as indeed critics render totalising theories of planetary urbanisation (see Goonewardena, 2018). The latest world-historical thinking on colonialism and imperialism, feminist social reproduction theory and ecological marxism demonstrates that this totality, whilst woven together by the uneven global development of capitalism, is by no means determined by capital – though value expansion is its dynamo – but rather overdetermined by articulated relations with other, older forms of hierarchy and domination, notably patriarchy, racism, nationalism, colonialism and ecological imperialism (Carson, 2024; Fraser, 2022; Gidwani and Maringanti, 2016; Hall, 2021; Mies, 1986; Moore, 2015; see also Bieler and Morton, 2024; Collard and Dempsey, 2020; Conroy, 2024b, 2024c; Irvine, 2023; Wyly, 2022). Indeed, as Goonewardena (2018) has illuminated, dialectical theories of totality stem from diverse epistemological perspectives, not only Marxist, but notably traversing materialist-feminist, political-ecologist, anti-colonial and Black radical traditions. Such an open, emergent and materialist conception of totality lies at the heart of conjunctural analysis.
Such critical theory shows how nature, gender, race, sexuality, nationality and other forms of difference, are not ‘constitutive outsides’ beyond capitalism (Conroy, 2024a). For this would suspend relational and dialectical thinking at the borders of apparently autonomous spaces and non-capitalist others – such as those conceptualised by JK Gibson-Graham (2006; see also Collard and Dempsey, 2020) – treated as external to the totality of relations that constitutes the world and, ironically, reproducing not only the Eurocentric, masculinist, colonial gaze of the pure and pristine, backward and under-developed ‘space-time of the other’ (Conroy, 2024a) but so too reproducing the very mystifying reifications that atomise, fragment, divide and demobilise us and which critical theory was forged specifically to demystify (O’Kane, 2021). ‘If there is no insistence upon totality’, wrote Lefebvre (2002: 181), ‘theory and practice accept the “real” just as it is, and “things” just as they are: fragmentary, divided and disconnected’.
A dialectical approach understands totality not as a static, closed object but a dynamic, open process of totalisation, whose different parts develop relatively autonomously from, but always in relation to, each other, changing the totality as its constituent parts evolve and whose functional interactions get reconstructed through crisis, contestation and struggle (Conroy, 2024a; Goonewardena, 2018; Halvorsen, 2025; Jameson, 1988; Jay, 1984; O’Kane, 2021). Mediation between part and whole is thus vital to this dynamic process of totalisation, which opens the space for agency, interruption, divergence, resistance, transformation – the subjective making of objective history. In his incisive clarifier on planetary urbanisation, Goonewardena (2018: 463) argues that
the concept of totality is nothing if not the mediation of object by subject and subject by object, that is ‘the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process’, wherein for Lukács (1971/1922: 3, 186) ‘history is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man’.
There are two vital aspects of Lukács’ notion of totality here: the mediation that produces those ‘objective forms that shape the life of man’; and the subjective standpoint that provokes the ‘unceasing overthrow’ of those objective forms. In other words, we have objective totality itself, and the subjective apprehension of that totality and its potential collective remaking through history.
First, how has mediation produced an objective totality? And what does this totality look like today, in the current conjuncture? Key here is Marx's dialectical method of grasping how contradictory parts – pulled apart by capital – form a differentiated unity through the process of mediation (see also Ollman, 2003). For instance, production appears to take place independently of consumption, and vice versa, undertaken by different subjects and at different sites and locations, whose functional differentiation is inscribed into space through the uneven zoning of farm, factory and home, central business district, suburb and slum. And yet, as Hall (2003: 122) interprets Marx, ‘production and consumption also mediate one another. By “mediate” here, Marx means that each cannot exist, complete its passage and achieve its result, without the other. Each is the other's completion. Each provides within itself the other's object. Thus, production's product is what consumption consumes’. Each, therefore, requires circulation of products and value, facilitated by an infrastructural circuitry, to enable this mediated separation, this relation of 'mutual dependence'. This raises a significant point – that mediation takes spatial form as (planetary) urbanisation, the ‘medium, site and expression of diverse, multiscalar political-economic processes’ (Brenner, 2019: 253) and ‘confluence of daily rhythms’ (Kipfer, 2023: 16) that are in turn managed and mediated but never fully controlled or captured by the state and capital (Conroy, 2024c; Goonewardena et al., 2008) – a point returned to in the conclusion.
Production and consumption – like labour and capital, subject and object, subjective needs and objective (re)production, core and periphery, urban and rural, value and waste – are thus mutually ‘indispensable’, necessary for each other's existence, yet appear as ‘external to each other’ (Marx, quoted in Hall, 2003: 123). The wage-relation is an ‘external necessity’: ‘as necessary from the standpoint of the individual but contingent as to whether or not wage work will actually be found’ (Cox, 2013: 9). In seeking to extend Marx's conception of capital so that it better captures capitalism's still-unfolding totalising articulation with other social forms, we might add further relations to these examples of mediation by external necessity – namely, gendered subjugation, racialised colonialism and ecological imperialism (Carson, 2024; Fraser, 2022; Gidwani and Maringanti, 2016; Hall, 2021; Mies, 1986; Moore, 2015; see also Bieler and Morton, 2024; Collard and Dempsey, 2020; Conroy, 2024b, 2024c; Irvine, 2023; Wyly, 2022). Such theorising demonstrates how uncommodified and non-capitalised spaces of unwaged work by human and non-human natures form an externalised and disavowed though externally necessary counterpart to capitalised spaces of wage-labour and the value form.
The upshot is that capitalism is only made profitable, or even viable, owing to its disavowed enrolment of non-capitalist spaces and externalised relations. Indeed, Maria Mies has long argued that the exploitation of wage-labour in capitalist production relies on the ‘superexploitation’ of non-waged or undervalued labour by ‘women, nature, peasants and colonies’ – the process by which capitalists appropriate, without paying for, ‘the general production of life, or subsistence production’ (Mies, 1986; also quoted in Collard and Dempsey, 2020: 243). Race, gender, ecology, and political institutions are, in Nancy Fraser's (2022) terms, capitalism's ‘background conditions of possibility’. The biggest disavowed background condition of possibility is, perhaps, waste; the ‘waste-value dialectic’ has been conceptualised to articulate how the labour-capital relation is incorporated within a higher-order relation with waste, which mediates the production of value (Gidwani and Maringanti, 2016; see also Irvine, 2023). Building on this work, Jason W Moore (2023) suggests that the expansion of commodified zones for the accumulation of capital is dependent on the even greater expansion of sacrifice zones and spaces of waste – understood relationally as material waste, dumping grounds and commons (spaces and populations ‘wasted’, leftover by capital).
Rebecca Carson (2024: 11) argues that non-capitalist elements within capitalist totality are ‘immanent externalities’, in that ‘they are required for formal circulation to take place and provide the basis for capital's reproduction processes […] and remain other to capital’. Carson suggests that the ‘displaced site of contradiction within capitalist social relations ought to be located in the tension between capitalist and non-capitalist elements of capital's circulation’. The contradiction between capital and labour is no longer capitalism's central point of conflict, displaced to the boundaries between internalised/capitalised and externalised/non-capitalised spaces. Read alongside Fraser's (2022) conceptualisation of the ‘boundary struggles’ marking the restructuring between background conditions of possibility, we can see how contestation over capital's contradictory relationship to such ‘immanent externalities’ might produce the crises that, I argue, are the object of conjunctural analysis.5
Where might we look for these conjunctural crises? Moore (2015) convincingly argues in his ‘world-ecological’ approach that capital accumulation based on exploitation depends on an even greater growth in appropriation of uncommodified natures and non-capitalised spaces; that crises of accumulation are only ever ‘resolved through great waves of geographical restructuring’ (Moore, 2015: 100) and spatial fixes that redraw boundaries between exploitation and expropriation, core and periphery, value and waste; and that, crucially, this entails the violent reorganisation of geographies of reproduction, with ‘new imperialisms, new forms of racist brutality, and new modes and scales of gendered social reproductive work’ (Conroy, 2023: 1101–1102). Here enters the state and the extra-economic forces of imperialism and nationalism – extremely important to the development of capitalism, and generative and ameliorative of conjunctural crises (Hart, 2020). To resolve crises of overaccumulation and combat falling rates of profit, capitalism requires periodic injections of ‘external natures’ (Conroy, 2024a) – both taps of unpaid work/energy and sinks for waste – and the state steps in to devise and institutionalise novel methods, techniques and technologies of extraction, to forcibly enrol otherwise externalised and unrelated humans and non-human natures into new regimes of accumulation.
In other words, the superexploitation identified by Mies is knitted together by a broader range of relations – not just the impersonal domination of the commodity relation, but also the personal and interpersonal dominations of gender, race and the colonial nation-state, including by ‘force and coercion’ (Mies, 1986: 48; also quoted in Collard and Dempsey, 2020: 243). Carson (2024) goes further, still, to argue that personal and interpersonal forms of domination based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, (dis)ability and age – theoretically sidelined by the impersonal domination of capital's value-form – are specifically back on the rise in this historical conjuncture. This, she explains, is because capitalism has attempted to resolve accumulating crises by investing in fictitious capital – speculative financialised products that are essentially unrealised value claims on future labour exploitation and unwaged value extraction. To ward off devaluation and further crises in the post-2008 conjuncture of secular stagnation and exhausted ‘cheap natures’ (Moore, 2015), capitalists have been forced to switch investment from productive into fictitious capital, thus placing additional pressures on externalised colonies and frontier zones at capital's colonial boundaries, as well as intensifying forms of domination in what Mies described as the ‘internal colonies’ of the household and gendered and racialised spaces of social reproduction; ‘the household is a colony, dominated by the metropolis, capital and state’ (Mies, 1986: 32; also quoted in Collard and Dempsey, 2020). ‘The variable of social reproduction, therefore’, argues Carson (2024: 5), ‘lies at the heart of fictitious capital's circulation, being required to reproduce both labour in the present and labour for the future’. In short, crises of social reproduction will only intensify until the conjuncture is ruptured through structural forces or political intervention. Might conjunctural analysis usefully attend to those spaces and moments of force and intervention, mediated by social, political and cultural crises?
Regimes of accumulation that extract value through planetary chains of interpersonal as well as impersonal domination are secured by technologies of coercion – in Gramscian terms – and consent, through ideology and common sense. This is the basis of hegemony, or leadership for class domination of society and nature (Ekers et al., 2012; Thomas, 2011). For Gramsci, the bourgeoisie is the first class in history to pursue hegemony – the generalised extension of bourgeois ways of life for upholding class domination – which, following the successful ‘active’ revolution of the French Jacobins in 1789, has taken the form of ‘passive revolution’, reactionary transformations that maintain domination in the face of weakening ‘affective attachments’ (Anderson and Secor, 2025) and subaltern revolt (see Hart, 2024: 148–150). Conjunctural analyses have traditionally sought to diagnose, and subvert, passive revolutions – fascism in the 1930s, authoritarian neoliberalism in the 1980s, and ‘revanchist populisms’, ‘Trump-Bannonisms’ and other reactionary-chauvinist nationalisms today (Clarke, 2023; Hart, 2020; Woolston and Mitchell, 2025).
Important here is Gramsci's (1971: 197; Q13§23) notion of the ‘organic’, underlying the ‘conjunctural’, whereby a ‘crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades’ with seemingly ‘incurable structural contradictions’ such that
political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them […] These incessant and persistent efforts […] form the terrain of the ‘conjunctural’, and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise.
The terrain of the conjunctural, then, is one of struggle for hegemony, under conditions of passive revolution, in which ‘relations of force’ play out across various levels – social, political, military – shaped by organic contradictions in regimes of accumulation (such as in the waste-value dialectic) expressed through and interlocking with conjunctural crises in politics, culture, subjectivity-formation and common sense (see also Hart, 2024). Such contradictions may condense into a crisis of authority in which popular consent and governing legitimacy are threatened (Clarke, 2023), whereby ‘affective attachments’ to dominant ideologies – liberalism, nationalism, populism – fracture and fray (Anderson and Secor, 2025). Conjunctural thinking is uniquely oriented to getting at, and unravelling, those stitching points in hegemonic articulations; its object of analysis is the decomposition and re-composition, under crisis conditions, of the relations of force that hold together articulations of hegemonic social formations.
‘But the most important observation to be made about any concrete analysis of the relations of force’, wrote Gramsci (1971: 194–195; Q13§17; my emphasis), is
that such analyses cannot and must not be ends in themselves (unless the intention is merely to write a chapter of past history), but acquire significance only if they serve to justify a particular practical activity, or initiative of will. They reveal the points of least resistance, at which the force of will can be most fruitfully applied; they suggest immediate tactical operations; they indicate how a campaign of political agitation may best be launched, what language will best be understood by the masses, etc. The decisive element in every situation is the […] force which can be put into the field when it is judged that a situation is favourable.
This shows clearly how conjunctural analysis is to be distinguished from merely social-scientific situational analysis, as a politically active orientation towards articulating the relations of force that structure any conjuncture in ways that ‘reveal’, ‘suggest’, ‘indicate’ and ‘judge’ which strategies and tactics to deploy in such situations for the subaltern struggle for hegemony.
At its most abstract, conjunctural analysis might identify, dissect, narrate and explain those geo-historical situations in which, as Stuart Hall (Hall and Massey, 2010: 38; see also Clarke, 2018) defined a ‘conjunctural crisis’,
these ‘relatively autonomous’ sites – which have different origins, are driven by different contradictions, and develop according to their own temporalities – are nevertheless ‘convened’ or condensed in the same moment. Then there is crisis, a break, a ‘ruptural fusion’.
A conjuncture, therefore, is not simply some impartial assemblage, composite or situation, but rather a politically charged and reflexive space-time in dialectical relation with totality in which contradictions ‘are condensed, or, as Althusser said, “fuse in a ruptural unity”’ and which contain antagonisms and struggles through which history is driven forward, ‘from one conjuncture to another’ (Hall and Massey, 2010: 57). Intervening in this forward motion of history is what conjunctural analysis must set out to do. And it must necessarily be launched from a particular subjective standpoint, even if history lacks an identifiable subject or clear-cut agent.
This brings us to the second aspect of Lukács’ notion of totality: subjectivity. For Lukács (1972) the subjective standpoint of the proletariat gives it privileged insight into the objective unfolding of history under capitalism, for only the proletariat has experienced the internal split between subject and object – rendered both commodified object (labour-power) and collective subject able to shift history through cooperation and class struggle (see also Jameson, 1988; Jay, 1984). The ‘self-knowledge of its own social situation’, the experience of being subjected to exploitation – turned into a unique commodity, labour-power – is the basis for the proletariat's embodied knowledge of the original contradiction, alienation, and therefore, its privileged insight into capitalist totality in all its brutal contradictions; ‘the self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society’ (Lukács, 1972: 149). And this is also the basis for its contemporary extension to other subjectivities beyond the proletariat, starting with feminist standpoint theory (see Goonewardena, 2018: 465–466).
This is the epistemological starting point, I would argue, for conjunctural analysis. A conjuncture can only really be apprehended from a standpoint within the totality. But the proletariat is not some subjective identity that we can locate in an individual subject – the figure of the waged working class – but rather a principle of relation within and to totality that cuts across many intersectional subjectivities; an orientation to totality from various positions of domination; the variegated standpoint for grasping (and thus potentially unmasking and transforming) the reified illusions of our open totality. This is the epistemological rationale of that ‘emancipatory ethico-political standpoint’ that Leitner and Sheppard (2020: 495) identify as animating conjunctural analysis. If conjunctural analysis is about apprehending totality from a particular standpoint in its articulated socio-spatial relations, then, owing to the way capitalism is (increasingly) dependent on unpaid work and energy, this standpoint must be interpreted expansively as a dialectical relation expressed in many different subjectivities and dominated positionalities, from wage-labourers to domestic labourers, from wage-slaves to chattel slaves, from peasants to waste workers, from manual to intellectual workers, from human to non-human nature – anyone and anything that produces value, by way of either exploitation or expropriation.
A big part of conjunctural analysis, then, is articulating connections between these various subjectivities to construct a cross-class coalition – the difficult political-cultural work of building a historic bloc across various levels, sites and scales (Clarke, 2023). This speaks to the second sense in which Gramsci employed articulation – as giving expression, voice or form to, as well as linking or connecting together in formation – and suggests the importance of translation and linguistic representation for the praxis orientation of conjunctural analysis (see Thompson et al., 2025: 49–51). Translation is a critical component of Gramscian conjunctural analysis in multiple senses: translating across difference to articulate a common sense that can speak to many different allied (but, under capitalism, pluralised, fragmented and divided) subjectivities; translating complex theoretical formulations into more vernacular forms for popular understanding to grasp opportunities for intervention; translating stories and archives of the past into visionary strategies and practical tactics for the present; translating radical ideas from one place or space to another (Kipfer and Mallick, 2022; Lorne et al., 2026).
Scientific speculation: past and future, abstract and concrete, theory and praxis
Finally, I turn to Marx's ‘scientific’ approach to prefiguring a different future from present contradictions. The ‘peculiar difficulty’ of Marx's method, wrote Hall (2003), is the ‘methodological requirement laid on his readers […] to maintain […] two modes of theoretical analysis’: the historical (diachronically attendant to contingent formation and emergence) and the structural (synchronically attendant to necessary form and function). In other words, capitalism's becoming and being (see Bieler and Morton, 2024: 6). In Capital, Marx's method was to understand the present functioning of capital by working backwards into history to map its historical determinants (i.e. money becoming capital). Intriguingly, Hall (2003: 138) suggests that, for Marx, ‘the historical conditions for the appearance of a mode of production disappear into its results’. That is, through the hegemonic extension of capital and its tendency to obscure its relational and historical production through reification, it covers its own tracks and begins to presuppose as transhistorical its own emergent dynamics. This is its extraordinary power that awes and blinds us to its operations: one of its ‘truly staggering aspects’ (Hall et al., 2013: 140); and the reason why, for Hall (2003: 138), Marx seeks to approach capital from an ‘essentially synchronic, structuralist’ approach as an abstract system, an ‘“anatomical” analysis of the structure of the capitalist mode’ – to meet capital at its own game, perhaps.
Marx often switches gear between structuralist and more historicist registers – the latter moving in the opposite direction, from the abstract (phenomenal appearances) to the concrete (real relations). Marx's historical method thus traces the genesis of bourgeois society and evolution of capitalism as a concrete social formation, whereby capitalism becomes dynamic and open-ended, rather than the more closed systematic analysis of its essential inner workings. If conjunctural analysis can be located within this dual dialectic of Marx's method – systematic analysis of abstract form; historical genealogy of concrete formation – it sits in the latter, historicist register, always beginning with the historical and the concrete. Conjunctural analysis is oriented towards discerning how socio-spatial totality is historically unfolding through conjunctural crisis conditions – what critical realists would call the ‘contingent’ – in ways which begin to shift its ‘necessary’ movements.6
If critical realism makes a clear-cut distinction between necessary and contingent relations, as a dualism (see Cox, 2013), then conjunctural analysis, I would argue, problematises or brackets that distinction. Critical realism suggests contingently related objects can exist independently or ‘externally’ to each other, whereas in the case of necessary relations, the relation is ‘internal’: ‘the nature of the relata depends on the relation itself’ (Conroy, 2024b). In his exegesis of the contingency/necessity debate for the question of how race and capital are related, William Conroy (2024b: 48, 46) reads race as ‘among those entrenched, embedded, and spatialised contingencies’, as ‘a contingent, relatively autonomous, and highly path-dependent terrain of struggle (re)produced in dialectical relation to the abstract level dynamics and requirements of capital’. Here, the ‘necessary’ relations of capital as a logical form are helpfully demarcated from the more ‘contingent’ relations of capitalism as a concrete formation. The domain of conjunctural analysis, then, lies precisely at the sharp-edged coalface of the shifting contours between the necessary and the contingent within capitalism as a concrete historical formation.
What do I mean by this? That conjunctural crises represent openings in organic structures that may, if replicated and compounded, begin to redraw the boundaries between contingency and necessity. Conroy (2024b) implicitly concedes the permeability – despite arguing for the critical realist distinction – between necessity and contingency in recognising that the necessary ‘laws’ of capital require updating over time, to now include, for instance, Moore's (2015) insight into ‘capital's need to maintain a “zone” of extra-economic expropriation greater than its ‘zone’ of capitalization’ (Conroy, 2024b: 46). If, indeed, conjunctural analysis lacks the tools to work this out, what it can do instead is identify moments of crisis that condense contradictions and put pressure on the ongoing historical transformation of necessary-contingent relations, through political intervention in the present, leaving the working out of contingent formation and necessary laws to other modes of historical materialist analysis.
Indeed, we cannot ask too much of conjunctural analysis. Conroy (2024b) argues that in work on race and capital that ‘proceeds in an Althusserian and Gramscian vein’, notably Hall's, while it provides
a compelling commitment to conjunctural analysis, and to the complex combinations that might define any historical-geographical moment, we are left with either (1) a complete obfuscation of the necessity/contingency distinction […] or (2) with the sense that racism is a non-necessity to capitalist society, but without a clear sense of the necessary ‘laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production’ – the ‘major goal of Marx's investigative effort’ (Ollman, 2003: 163) – that mediate such articulations and combinations. (Hall (1986) alludes to these laws but does not engage them directly.)
Conroy's reading of conjunctural analysis makes the apparently reasonable critique that it only alludes to and fails to engage directly the laws of motion of capital. Yet that's precisely the point of conjunctural approaches: to hold such theoretical conceptions of capitalism's necessary structure in the background of the analytical frame to foreground and get a sharper focus on the multitudinous ways in which that structure is being contested, reshaped and rearticulated with other social forms that begin to shift its logical operations over time.
What does this look like in terms of capital's evolving relation to race? ‘Race’, for Hall (2021[1980]: 239), ‘is, also, the modality in which class is “lived,” the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and “fought through.”’ Crucially, capitalism's historical co-evolution with race and colonialism has segmented the working class such that the superexploitation and appropriation of unpaid work and energies from the 'internal colonies' (Mies, 1986) and colonial peripheries – increasingly vital for capital's viability, as per Conroy's (2024b) argument for Moore's (2015) new necessary law – is enabled by race and the racialisation of labour (see Hall, 2021[1980], 1986). Not only does this racial segmentation ‘leverage racial subsidies in pursuit of profit’ (Achille Mbembe, quoted in Bieler and Morton, 2024: 16); it also, for Hall (2021[1980]: 239–240), ‘has consequences in terms of the internal fractioning and division within the working class’, which ‘dominates the divided class’ and shores up the ongoing reproduction of capitalist and imperialist social relations in the absence of unified class consciousness or struggle, ‘through harnessing the dominated classes to capital by means of the articulation of the internal contradictions of class experience with racism’. Race, and anti-racism, thus becomes a pivotal domain for conjunctural interventions into the ongoing transformation of capitalism; concomitant arguments can be made for ecology, gender and other forms of difference and domination.
Hall's injunction for conjunctural thinking, building on Gramsci, was ‘to address ourselves “violently” towards the present as it is’, in all its concrete complexity (see Shock, 2020) So, by attending to capitalism as it is – not as a simple abstraction of necessary laws but as the historically produced ‘dialectical matrix’ of race, gender and class (Bieler and Morton, 2024) – the historically necessary or logically contingent distinction begins to blur, to fall away, become a moot point. As an epistemology, a way of seeing, conjunctural analysis focuses our attention instead on the concrete ways in which this dialectical matrix is subtly reshaped through crisis and contestation.
If critical realism moves from the abstract to the concrete, and Marx's historical method the reverse – from the concrete to the abstract – then conjunctural approaches, by contrast, begin with the concrete and – herein lies the difference with Marx's historical method – stay with the concrete; the abstract is kept at bay while nonetheless deeply informing the ‘concrete analysis of concrete situations’ (Hall, 2003: 128).7 Rather than producing theoretical abstractions from the concrete about the historical formation of capitalism, conjunctural approaches produce practical, future-oriented concrete analyses – strategies and tactics – about how that ongoing historical formation may be transformed through action. It thus takes a more forward-looking orientation to history.
A conjunctural approach to race and class, therefore, would interrogate a concrete situation in which their historical co-constitution is put under pressure by crisis conditions – a focus in which this sharp analytical distinction between necessity and contingency is analytically suspended, if not collapsed, in favour of prising openings in these changing relations for insights into alliance building and tactical manoeuvres. Put another way, whilst it is logically possible, as Conroy (2024b) argues, for capital to exist without racism, colonialism and patriarchy, it only actually exists as a dialectical matrix or differentiated unity with many determinations – the domain of the conjunctural.
The concept of the differentiated unity is, for Hall (2003: 127), the ‘methodological and theoretical key to [the Grundrisse] and to Marx's method as a whole’. This is the idea that we must examine both the ‘internal structure’ of any form or relation and ‘those other structures to which it is coupled and with which it forms’, such that ‘[b]oth the specificities and the connections – the complex unities of structures – have to be demonstrated by the concrete analysis of concrete relations and conjunctions’. Abstract forms such as the capital relation only ever exist as concrete formations with other relations, shaped by historical determinations, to form a differentiated unity of ‘many determinations and relations’ (Marx, quoted by Hall, 2003: 127).
The concrete ways in which these relations are articulated into a differentiated unity ‘cannot be conjured out of thin air according to some essentialist dialectical law’, but ‘must be demonstrated’ by materialist analysis – Marx's ‘profane’ history (Hall, 2003: 128, 124). The seemingly abstract value form is only realised through the ‘mediating movement’ (Marx) of capital between those moments in the circuit, from production to consumption; ‘there is no guarantee to the producer – the capitalist – that what he produces will return again to him: he cannot appropriate it “immediately”’ (Hall, 2003: 125). Again, mediation is pivotal – governed by determinate conditions that are ‘external’ to capital, by cultural norms and common sense, institutions and the state, waged and unwaged workers, social conflict.
This is the basis of Hall's (1983) marxism without guarantees – ‘[n]othing except the maintenance of these determinate conditions can guarantee the continuity of this mode of production over time’ (Hall, 2003: 125). It defines what Hart (2024) describes as Hall's ‘distinctive’ reading of Marx and rendering of articulation as method: a Gramsci-inspired conjunctural thinking in which conjuncture is not opposed to the essence of structure, ‘as its surface or punctual state’, but rather enables a ‘“conjunctural” understanding of structure and its changes’ (Koivisto and Lahtinen, 2012: 276).
Importantly, this necessary mediation of the necessary dynamics of capitalism – by contingent determinate conditions, with ‘no guarantee that those conditions will always be fulfilled’ (Hall, 2003: 116) – means that, for Hall (2003: 125), capitalism is ‘a system capable of breaks, discontinuities, contradictions, interruptions: a system with limits, within historical time’. This is a point that Hart has repeatedly underlined in her theorisation of postcolonial Marxism, dialectical-relational comparison and conjunctural analysis: to locate the ‘slippages, openings, and contradictions [to] help us generate new understandings of the possibilities of social change’ (Hart, 2006: 982; Hart, 2024). It is precisely in this mediated gap that opportunities open up for social resistance, political contestation and potential transformation of capital and its articulated social forms of domination – and the space where we should look to begin a conjunctural analysis.
A conjunctural approach would thus analyse how these determinate conditions have come to be articulated, historically, in ways which maintain the dominating differentiated unity we call capitalism, colonialism or imperialism, with a view to acting on these conditions in the present to reshape the future. It would seek to identify points of weakness, in times of crisis, when such articulations are placed under strain, for subaltern agents to exploit strategically to their advantage, for rearticulation. This dovetails with Gilbert's (2019: 15) definition as strategic mapping: ‘The aim of conjunctural analysis is always to map a social territory, in order to identify possible sites of political intervention’. Conjunctural analysis, therefore, does not simply trace historical genesis in a backward-looking movement; it attempts something singular: to map current conditions from a more speculative orientation to history, articulating a future vision and representing the present balance of forces in ways that make their transformation seem more possible.
Such a Gramscian movement of ‘prevision’, suggests Thomas, is ‘conceived neither as prediction nor foresight, but as that which allows the present to be seen differently so as to make possible a practico-political intervention in the present’ (Thomas 2017: 299; see also Hart, 2024). Conjunctural analysis thus reaches forward in time, as well as backwards, to explain the historical development of the present in terms that might help achieve the strategic goals of hegemonic struggle – the final cause of conjunctural praxis (see Thompson et al., 2025). And this, arguably, provides the basis for seeing it as an important extension, a third component, to the dual dialectic of Marx's method.
As Hart (2020, 2024) has written widely about, a conjunctural orientation to historical change bears deep affinities with Lefebvre's ‘regressive-progressive method’: first, regressively, ‘starting in the present, working our way back to the past, and then retracing our steps’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 66; quoted in Hart, 2024: 151); and, second, progressively projecting into the future from present conditions a ‘virtual object’, or strategic vision, such that the regressive ‘understanding of reality as a realized possibility was complemented, in The Urban Revolution, by an understanding of possibility as the virtual aim of the current tendencies’ (Stanek, 2008: 160). Łukasz Stanek (2008) has elucidated how the regressive moves, quoting Lefebvre (2003: 24), ‘from the virtual to the actual, the actual to the past’, whilst the progressive moves ‘from the obsolete and completed to the movement that anticipates that completeness, that presages and brings into being something new’. Hart (2018: 377) cites Stuart Elden (2004: 38–39): ‘For Lefebvre, this [regressive-progressive method] is the dialectic at work, in the way that was discovered by Marx’.
We might thus see conjunctural analysis as the exemplary form of what Sam Halvorsen (2025) conceptualises as ‘strategic geographies’. Citing conjunctural analysis as a prime example, Halvorsen channels Gramsci's and Lefebvre's dramatic sense of strategy and tactics, highlighting the story-telling power and compositional purpose of strategic geographies. If, for Lefebvre (2003), tactics intervene directly in everyday life, urban strategy contests the fragmentation and peripheralisation actuated by urban ideology and capitalist totality with a visionary goal and direction – a virtual object – for political projects seeking to transform that totality through urban revolution. If conjunctural analysis has any particular purpose for critical urban research, then, it lies in its strategic capacity to map crisis conditions, evaluate the balance of forces, and formulate strategy and tactics for mobilising urban revolutions (Kipfer, 2023).
Conclusion: knowing where, how and why to look for the conjuncture
Having now made the argument that conjunctural analysis is not a straightforwardly reflexive or positive social science per se but, rather, a distinctive mode of praxis – a third method of historical materialism, understood expansively as an open and integral critical theory; a marxism without guarantees (Hall, 1983); a method oriented towards the political unfolding of the future, rather than the historical production of the present – this leaves us with the implications for doing conjunctural analysis in urban research. Where should we begin?
First, the focus on the ‘slippages, openings, and contradictions’ (Hart, 2006: 982) within the mediation of totalising socio-spatial relations draws attention to the mediums in which such breaks occur: specifically, the urban and the state. If conjunctural analysis has traditionally been concerned with the reproduction and disruption of hegemony at the scale of the nation-state – captured in Gramsci's (1971) concept of the ‘national-popular’ – what might the rescaling of state-urban relations through planetary urbanisation mean for its scale of focus? How to understand hegemonic struggle at a time when, as Massey put it to Hall, ‘the whole concept of hegemony no longer operates in quite the same way’ (Hall and Massey, 2010: 69) as Gramsci meant it? In our current conjuncture of deglobalisation, secular stagnation and the new state capitalism, nationalisms are back on the rise – but in the intervening period the urban has come to mediate globalising capitalism like never before (Brenner, 2019). How does this shift from the national to the urban problematise hegemonic struggle? What would a politics of the ‘urban-popular’ look like?8 How might conjunctural analysis help give shape to the urban-popular? And how might this reshape conjunctural analysis in this conjuncture?
Such questions are approachable through the dual notion of the urban as level of mediation (between the macro-forces of the state and capital and the micro-processes of everyday life) and as ‘a form of centrality’ – writes Kipfer (2023: 15) in the register of an open, integral historical materialism engaging closely with Lefebvre as well as Gramsci and Fanon (Goonewardena et al., 2008) – a form of centrality ‘in which a range of differences encounter each other in various ways, physically (in the built environment), socially and economically (through dynamics of agglomeration) or politically (by means of convergence of political forces)’. Urban centrality denotes not only spatial convergences of struggles but also political ‘condensation[s] of power expressed in the state and its capacity to centralise the social surplus’ in ways which produce moments of potential transformation across the uneven organs and arteries of extended planetary urbanisation – encompassing ‘bundled infrastructural networks, extractive zones, or agro-industrial complexes’ alongside metropoles (Kipfer, 2023: 15–16). The urban provides the spatial infrastructure for capital's reorganisation of relations of production and reproduction, exploitation and expropriation, as it seeks to overcome crises through spatial fixes (Brenner, 2019), whilst also presenting resistance in the circuitry of value, through harbouring and channelling diverse subaltern energies and differential desires. If the ‘multiscalar urban fabric itself provides the “contour lines” that we might trace to identify new forms of political solidarity’ (Conroy, 2024c: 974) – solidarities that transcend national borders, town-country divides, fragmented subjectivities and boundaries between paid and unpaid work – then how might conjunctural analyses contribute to tracing these contour lines? Below I sketch some cursory answers.
Second, both the totalising conjuncture itself and the totalising modes of analysis required to apprehend it – synthesising materialist eco-feminist, social reproduction, world-ecological, anti-colonial and critical urban theory – require of us a more rigorously relational and global approach to urban conjunctural analyses. In a world-historical conjuncture in which capitalism is fast exhausting its taps of externalised work/energy, and fast polluting the sinks it needs to dump its exponentially rising wastes and toxifications (Moore, 2015) – thereby exacerbating climate and ecological breakdown through escalating metabolic rifts and shifts (McClintock, 2010) and boomeranging back to intensify financialisation, extraction and interpersonal domination (Carson, 2024) – in such a conjuncture, every site of organic and conjunctural crisis and contestation is more interconnected than ever before. We cannot escape the increasingly entangled fates of what Conroy (2023: 1104) identifies as ‘conjunctures in which the putative “gains” of one sphere (won, perhaps, through boundary struggle [Fraser, 2022]) are offset by greater exploitation, expropriation, and/or forced underconsumption in the others, as capital seeks to maintain its world-ecological surplus and keep costs off the books—with stark implications for the kinds of solidaristic politics that any socialist movement requires’. Undertaking conjunctural analysis in one place or urban site necessarily entangles multiple others the world over, necessitating the kind of inter-urban relational-comparison and global conjunctural analyses undertaken by Hart (2018; 2024) and Leitner and Sheppard (2020), and a heightened sensitivity to how strategy and tactics for one urban situation have knock-on effects for distantly related struggles elsewhere. We need to trace those impacts as part of any conjunctural analysis. But is this asking too much of conjunctural analysis?
Third, and finally, such a materialist approach to conjunctures can connect, as Gramsci insisted, the conjunctural with the organic – to explain how crises in national and local politics, culture, identity and subjectivity-formation are necessarily linked to crises in (re)production at a global level, and the nature of these interconnections, for politically useful explanations of conjunctures. What might this look like in practice? We might take inspiration from Katharyne Mitchell's (1993) early, only implicitly, urban conjunctural analysis of how the liberal-bourgeois Canadian-nationalist doctrine of multiculturalism, the ‘united colours of capitalism’, was rolled out in Vancouver as a hegemonic discourse to smooth relations and flows of capital in response to the racist localism contesting the influx of Chinese migrants and transpacific speculative investment in anticipation of the British-colonial handover of Hong Kong.9 Race, nation, colonialism, global capital flows, urban growth regimes, intersectional conflict and the cultural reproduction of hegemony are brought into conversation to explain the city's reactionary politics and the parameters for any emancipatory social change.
Fast-forwarding to the present, we might look to the conjunctural strategies of the Indigenous nations Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh – collectively now Vancouver's largest landowners – who are playing colonial racial capitalism at its own game by harnessing the rising value of prime retail estate for self-determination, exploiting ‘moral rent gaps’ on land they have inhabited and stewarded – yet only recently owned through legal entitlement – for hundreds of generations (Wyly, 2022: 77–81). In a strange twist of fate, capitalism's bloody prehistory (and ongoing reproduction) of primitive accumulation, imperial empire-building, settler-colonial genocide and Eurocentric ethnoracial nationalism are being transmogrified and morally inverted through ‘space-time portals’ opened up by the lucrative deal-making done by Indigenous property partnerships that attempt to cash in unpayable debts owed by dispossessors: hence moral rent gaps. Elvin Wyly's (2022) work thus suggests how urban rent gaps around the world represent not only release valves and spatial fixes for capitalist crises of overaccumulation but also portals – spatiotemporal pressure points in the social totality that condense systemic contradictions, far-flung places, intergenerational debts, and past and future histories – through which class relations (of rent and debt as well as wage-labour) might get refracted and whose knotted entanglement with other relations of domination might get unravelled and rearticulated through strategic wars of position waged across land markets, law courts and (trans-)national medias. Might moral rent gaps – speculative openings in the tightening fabric of planetary urbanisation – alongside other frontiers in intensive and extended urbanisation (Cowan, 2025), provide an entry-point for conjunctural urban research today?
We might find another entry-point in the crises catalysing ascendant ‘exclusionary nationalisms’ and chauvinist populisms traced by Hart's (2020, 2024) global conjunctural analysis of South Africa, India and the USA: a portal through which we might then refract socio-psychoanalytic readings of climate denialism and fossil fascism, and world-systems and world-ecological analyses of secular stagnation and exhaustion of cheap natures – to better understand a conjuncture in which accumulating wastes and toxifications undermine ecological productivity and threaten working-class subsistence in the global core based on a faltering imperial mode of living (Conroy, 2023; Gidwani and Maringanti, 2016; Moore, 2023). Might we locate the condensation of these crises in urban situations that present contested opportunities for disruption and transformation – and possible ways into articulating the urban-popular?
Such an endeavour could, for instance, look to such politically ambiguous rebellions as the Gilets Jaunes troubling the left–right and urban–rural divides (Kipfer, 2023); to the struggles over ‘sanctuary cities’ that provide spaces of refuge for migrants and minorities in defiance of both national ‘revanchist populism’ and urban revanchism (Woolston and Mitchell, 2025); to condensations of multi-level crises within global cities motivating the strategic articulation of cross-class urban coalitions and the waging of wars of manoeuvre by resurgent municipal socialists on the terrain of the local state, from New York City to Zagreb (Thompson et al., 2025); to the blockading and rerouting of rentier capitalism's subsumption of ‘agrarian-urban frontiers’ in the postcolonial periphery and semi-periphery, for an ‘urbanisation without guarantees’ (Cowan, 2025); to the urban-rural convergence of environmental and climate movements, centred in cities, with peasant and indigenous struggles at commodity frontiers, articulating ‘new ontological politics’ (Moore, 2015); or, perhaps, to ‘metabolic municipalisms’ that seek to construct bioregional popular infrastructures and translocal counter-logistics for transforming urban metabolisms in ways that might begin to resist or reconfigure the just-in-time planetary logistics that chain us to capitalist and imperialist domination (Nishat-Botero and Thompson, 2025).
Or, following more closely in the footsteps of Policing the Crisis, we might begin with the transatlantic culture wars and moral panic over transphobia, which Kiely (2024) diagnoses as a condensation of crises in social reproduction – escalating housing rents, childcare costs, consumer debts and public austerity, and the exhaustion of political-economic possibilities – transferred to, and articulated with, an anxious affective politics defending the perceived sanctity of bodily common sense, sexual binaries and national borders. Reacting to material austerity, transphobia ‘promises to put bodies back in their place and thereby restore a lost social order’; ‘a cultural signification of trans women as deceptive boundary crossers’ intersects with ‘racist imaginaries of migrants in small boats who breach the boundaries of the nation’ (Kiely, 2024). Drawing on and feeding into Transgender Marxism (Gleeson and O'Rourke, 2021), Kiely's work shows how transphobia is a conjunctural symptom, as well as catalyst, of organic crises of social reproduction – an eruption in ‘property regimes, working patterns, unwaged labour, family structures, and domestic life’ (Gleeson and O'Rourke, 2021: 8) – one that can therefore be located at the urban level, notably in urban austerity, rents, debts, and the financialisation and assetisation of housing and care.
Whatever our entry-point – and these are just some examples – if conjunctural analysis is to present a methodologically distinctive, politically salient and historically urgent method for urban research it requires the kind of open historical materialist epistemology that I have sketched out here: a theory that can help us see where, how – and why – to look for the conjuncture.
Acknowledgements
The paper's central argument was first presented at a workshop on conjunctural analysis organised by Jamie Peck at UBC during the Urban Affairs Association annual conference in Vancouver, April 2025. Thanks to Jamie for convening the space for a rolling conversation over several days and in subsequent correspondence. Inspiration was also found at the three sessions on Mapping Crises and Conjunctures that Colin Lorne and I co-convened at the RGS-IBG annual conference in London, September 2024. A reading group organised by Sam Halvorsen on Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality has proven especially generative. The article was largely written during a visiting research fellowship at the Institute for Inclusive Economies and Sustainable Livelihoods at the University of Toronto, May–June 2025, where some of its ideas were debated with Rachel Bok, Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer and Sergio Montero. Thanks to Sergio for the invite to visit. I’m especially grateful to Jamie, Colin, Sam, Sergio, as well as Ed Kiely, Sue Moore and Hannah Schling, for reading and critiquing the first draft, sharpening this version; and to Elvin Wyly and the two anonymous reviewers for expertly reviewing and editing the piece.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Matthew Thompson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5691-4851
Footnotes
1. Hall and Massey were, alongside Michael Rustin, co-founding editors-in-chief of Soundings, established in 1995, and which has been an incubator and populariser of conjunctural thinking, and a bridge between cultural studies and geography. Together they wrote, in 2015, the Kilburn Manifesto, an analysis of the post-2008 conjuncture entitled After Neoliberalism?
2. This stream of thinking has recently been dubbed the Toronto School, as co-founding editor Jordan T Camp puts it to Kipfer in an episode of the wonderful Conjuncture podcast: ‘what some of us are calling a “Toronto School” of radical geography and political and social theory’ (Camp, 2025). The Toronto School has plural influences and variegated tendencies: it is associated mostly with the strands of urban political ecology and critical urbanism emerging from the city and notably Roger Keil, as explored in a dedicated RC21 panel at the 2018 ISA World Congress of Sociology, hosted in Toronto, on ‘the Toronto School of Urban Thinking’, which Keil co-organised with Ute Lehrer; and it began life as an idea first floated by planning scholar Pamela Robinson, circulating amongst a loose group of scholars, from all three Toronto universities, interested in political economy, political ecology and social justice in the city-region. Thanks to Roger Keil for clarifying these details.
3. Thanks to Bertie Russell for pointing this out to me.
4. Thanks to Ayyaz Mallick for this intriguing characterisation of dialectics as democratic.
5. Fraser's (2022) conception has been critiqued for positing these background conditions as problematically externally rather than internally (dialectically) related (see Bieler and Morton, 2024; Conroy, 2023; O’Kane, 2021).
6. Thanks to Eric Sheppard and Martin Jones for raising the question of the relationship between critical realism and conjunctural analysis, in terms of the abstract and the concrete, at the 2024 RGS-IBG conference sessions I co-organised with Colin Lorne on Mapping Crises and Conjunctures.
7. This phrase Hall borrowed from Lenin, remarking, in his proto-conjunctural analysis of the Bolshevik Revolution in his 1920 article in Kommunisma: The Journal of the Communist International for the Countries of South-Eastern Europe, that the ‘very gist, the living soul, of Marxism’ is the ‘concrete analysis of a concrete situation’.
8. Thanks to Ayyaz Mallick for raising this important question.
9. Mitchell's 2004 book on the same case, Crossing the Neoliberal Line: Pacific Rim Migration and the Metropolis, and Massey's 1984 Spatial Divisions of Labour, are exemplified in Sheppard et al.'s (2024) encyclopaedia entry as two classic conjunctural analyses within geography, despite neither invoking explicitly conjunctural terminology.
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Biographies
Matthew Thompson is Lecturer in Urban Studies at the UCL Bartlett School of Planning. He is the author of Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool's Hidden History of Collective Alternatives (2020, Liverpool University Press).
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Article first published online: March 23, 2026
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