Collage posters by Michael Lardner
Birth of The Marxist Education Project
In the late 1980s the Brecht Forum was launched by the founders of the first School for Marxist Education (1975) and members of the regrouped collective, the New York Marxist School. After the Brecht Forum closed in 2014, some of the Brecht’s teachers and activists continued offering classes and forums at The Brooklyn Commons. These efforts were soon reorganized under the rubric of the Marxist Education Project.
Conditions today are dramatically different from the mid-1970s when the New York Marxist School was founded. The re-shaping of New York as a global luxury city has raised real estate prices to a level that makes it extremely difficult to maintain a space that is accessible citywide and doesn’t either charge its users a lot of money, have an endowment or own the building. The falling real wages for the working class and frequent need for workers to work more hours or several jobs has made it harder for people to sustain alternative institutions on a volunteer basis. The rising cost of living makes it harder for people to work for “movement wages” over the long-term. Nonetheless, we want to continue the classes and programming once presented by the Brecht Forum. With the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020 we ceased presenting in public venues and moved all our efforts online.
While the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School era has come to a close, it has not brought to an end our ideas nor the need to address the questions of the era, though many need to be reformulated and new organizational forms appropriate to current conditions need to be found. We look to all generations in all our diverse colors and cultural, ethnic, religious and national expressions, gender identifications, sexual orientations and commitments to particular issues and struggles to advance the movement towards human emancipation-and we’ll stick around for the many struggles ahead.