Revolutions Study Group
Dual Presentation: Community Restaurants with Benjamin Selwyn / Postcapitalism: Alternatives or Detour?
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsCommunity Restaurants: Decommodifying Food as Socialist Strategy with Benjamin Selwyn The outbreak of Covid-19 has exacerbated many of the system’s worst aspects. In the UK, the birthplace of free wage-labor based capitalist agriculture, the pandemic has exacerbated existing food inequities. The pandemic has stimulated discussions about how to remedy the world’s corporate-dominated food system. The most popular alternative ... Read more
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Reconsidering Primitive Accumulation
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis session will be devoted to engaging with Rosa’s pivotal reworking of the concept of primitive accumulation, with attention to historical and contemporary South Africa, medieval European race-making and its legacies, and contemporary commodification of women’s reproductive labor.
The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWith cutting-edge analyses, this book looks at the many dark facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers' struggles, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and much more. “The Cost of Free Shipping” shows how Amazon represents a fundamental shift in global capitalism that we should name, interrogate and be primed to resist.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Unfinished Conversations with Revolutionary Women
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe remaining five sessions of this seminar series explore some of her signal contributions—her argument that imperialism and primitive accumulation are endemic to capitalism; her prescient attention to racist super-exploitation in southern Africa; her insistence that socialism had to be created in and through the widest form of participatory democracy, including the mass strike; her reflections, with attention to the other-than-human world and incarceration, on transformative subjectivities—through putting them in conversation with Global Southern thinkers past and present.
Organizing Insurgency: Workers’ Movements in the Global South
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsLooking at contemporary case studies in India, the Philippines and South Africa, this book affirms the significance of political and economic representation to the struggles of workers against deepening levels of poverty and inequality that oppress the majority of people on the planet. Immanuel Ness shows that workers are eager to mobilize to improve their conditions, and can achieve lasting gains if they have sustenance and support from political organizations.
Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe level of popular discontent—in the United States as elsewhere—has shown a dramatic increase in recent years, but has yet to crystallize into a cohesive anti-capitalist political force. Socialist Practice aims to contribute to a popular movement for socialism.
Towards a Revolution in Labor History: White Supremacism and Bourgeois Social Control
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhy is the US working class unorganized and suffering to a far greater extent than in other advanced capitalist societies?
Re:sources / Re:lations with Working Group on Globalization and Culture
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture will share our collective research on two ubiquitous words of our contemporary vocabulary: resources and relations this coming Sunday, June 6/
THEMATIC CLUSTERS: On Sunday June 6, we will present the two clusters: Source Memory: Relating Archival Contradictions and The Relations of Human Resources.
Amakomiti: Grassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsCan people who live in shantytowns, shacks and favelas teach us anything about democracy? About how to govern society in a way that is inclusive, participatory and addresses popular needs? This book argues that they can. In a study conducted in dozens of South Africa's shack settlements, where more than 9 million people live, Trevor Ngwane finds thriving shack dwellers' committees that govern local life, are responsive to popular needs and provide a voice for the community.
Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle: Strategies, Tactics, Objectives
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBy engaging in what Karl Marx called a workers' inquiry, workers and militant co-researchers are studying their working conditions, the technical composition of capital, and how to recompose their own power in order to devise new tactics, strategies, organizational forms and objectives. These workers’ inquiries, from call center workers to platform, trucking, cleaning, logistics, mining, auto factories, teachers, and adjunct professors, are re-energizing unions, bypassing unions altogether or innovating new forms of workers' organizations.
AUGMENTED EXPLOITATION: Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsGoing beyond platform work and the gig economy, the authors explore emerging forms of algorithmic governance and AI-augmented apps that have been developed to utilise innovative ways to collect data about workers and consumers, as well as to keep wages and worker representation under control. They also show that workers are not taking this lying down, providing case studies of new and exciting form of resistance that are springing up across the globe.
Pluto Wildcat Series: Final 2 sessions—Augmented Exploitation and Wobblies of the World
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThese books uncover the radical militancy which characterises international workers struggles, both contemporary and historical. Looking at diverse topics including proletarianisation and class formation, mass production, gender, affective and reproductive labour, syndicalism and independent unions, and labour and Leftist social and political movements, it is the most comprehensive exploration into workers’ organisation being developed today. All books from the series are available at the MEP on-line book store.
Pluto Wildcat Series: Final 2 sessions—Augmented Exploitation and Wobblies of the World
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThese books uncover the radical militancy which characterises international workers struggles, both contemporary and historical. Looking at diverse topics including proletarianisation and class formation, mass production, gender, affective and reproductive labour, syndicalism and independent unions, and labour and Leftist social and political movements, it is the most comprehensive exploration into workers’ organisation being developed today. All books from the series are available at the MEP on-line book store.
WOBBLIES OF THE WORLD: A Global History of the Industrial Workers of the World
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsDrawing on many important figures of the movements such as Tom Barker, Har Dayal, Joe Hill, James Larkin and William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, and exploring particular industries including shipping, mining, and agriculture, this book describes how the IWW and its ideals travelled around the world.
Capital, V1, Part 2: The Transformation of Money Into Capital
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe will do a close reading of the chapters in Part Two of Volume I of Capital on “The Transformation of Money Into Capital”. In these chapters Marx introduces the fundamental concepts of capital,labor power, surplus value and the valorization process.