Classes/Events
The Bisbee Deportation / The Battle of Blair Mountain
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants• On July 12, 1917, in the mining town of Bisbee Arizona, twelve hundred striking miners and their supporters were rounded up by forces organized by the town sheriff and the mining companies, marched through the town, parked in the town's baseball field, and then put in boxcars and shipped into the New Mexican desert.
• When the smoke cleared on the Battle of Blair Mountain, an estimated 1 million rounds were fired, dozens were killed, and 985 miners were arrested. The uprising was suppressed, but public awareness about the appalling conditions in which the miners were forced to live, work, and raise their families grew considerably.
James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsSituating this dissident communist movement within the history of class struggle, both national and international, Palmer examines how Cannon and others fought to revive a combative trade unionism, thwart fascism and the drift to war, refuse Stalinism’s many degenerations, and build a new Party and a new International, both of which would be dedicated to reviving and realizing the possibilities of revolutionary socialism.
First They Took Rome with author David Broder
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsStudying the rise of forces like Matteo Salvini’s Lega, this book shows how the populist right drew on a deep well of social despair, ignored by the liberal center. Italy’s recent history is a warning from the future—the story of a collapse of public life that risks spreading across the West. First They Took Rome offers this perspective: Italy isn’t failing to keep up with its international peers but farther along the same path of decline they are following. In the 1980s, Italy boasted the West’s strongest Communist Party; today, social solidarity is collapsing, working people feel ever more atomized, and democratic institutions grow increasingly hollow.
Clipped Coins and Civilizing Money: George Caffentzis on John Locke and David Hume
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsGeorge Caffentzis makes both an intervention in the field of monetary philosophy and into Marxist conceptions of the relation between philosophy and capitalist development. Clipped Coins and Civilizing Money have just been released by Pluto Press. George will be joined in discussion with Peter Linebaugh and Carl Wennerlind
Studies in the Works of Antonio Gramsci with Piruz Alemi
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis 10-week session has four sessions remaining which feature a close reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We will look to connect cultures and their human rights struggles. We will also explore those who influenced Gramsci, particularly Marx, but also Machiavelli and Croce. This seminar is accessible to people at all levels of familiarity with Gramsci’s work, including those just beginning their studies of Gramsci. Join at any time.
The Essential Political Writings of Hubert Harrison
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJeffrey B Perry describes Harrison “as the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals in those years” adding that he is “a key link in the two great trends of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggle—the labor and civil rights trend associated associated with A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the race and nationalist trend associated with Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.”
Value, Fictitious Capital and Finance. The Timelessness of Karl Marx’s Capital with John Milios
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsStarting from his value-form analysis in Part One of Volume 1 of Capital, Marx develops the concept of “fictitious capital” in Volume 3, which depicts the role of interest-bearing capital and the financial sphere. Marx’s analysis allows for an understanding of contemporary capitalism, financialization and crisis: financialization cannot be isolated from “real” economy; it should be conceived as a “technology” of exercising capitalist power and hegemony over the working classes and the society as a whole. Marx’s analysis provides the terms to rethink the contemporary neoliberal form of capitalism and its crisis as expressions of the contradictions inherent in the organization of capitalist power.
Studies in the Works of Antonio Gramsci with Piruz Alemi
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis 10-week session has four sessions remaining which feature a close reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We will look to connect cultures and their human rights struggles. We will also explore those who influenced Gramsci, particularly Marx, but also Machiavelli and Croce. This seminar is accessible to people at all levels of familiarity with Gramsci’s work, including those just beginning their studies of Gramsci. Join at any time.
George Caffentzis on Locke and Hume: Book special prices are still available
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBoth books by George Caffentzis, CLIPPED COINS and CIVILIZING MONEY are still available! Buy one or both.
The Essential Political Writings of Hubert Harrison
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJeffrey B Perry describes Harrison “as the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals in those years” adding that he is “a key link in the two great trends of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggle—the labor and civil rights trend associated associated with A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the race and nationalist trend associated with Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.”
Studies in the Works of Antonio Gramsci with Piruz Alemi
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis 10-week session has four sessions remaining which feature a close reading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We will look to connect cultures and their human rights struggles. We will also explore those who influenced Gramsci, particularly Marx, but also Machiavelli and Croce. This seminar is accessible to people at all levels of familiarity with Gramsci’s work, including those just beginning their studies of Gramsci. Join at any time.
Ecosocialism in the Shadow of Covid
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe will read and discuss three books: The Corona Crash (Verso), by Grace Blakeley, details how the pandemic is ushering in a new era in which the corporate economy collapses into the arms of the state, and behemoths like Amazon and Netflix balloon in profit and power. White Skin, Black Fuel (Verso), by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, takes a comprehensive look at how extreme-right currents are responding to ecological crises with with authoritarian and xenophobic proposals while remaining ardent supporters of fossil capital – black fuels to support white supremacy. And A People’s Green New Deal (Pluto), by Max Ajl, engages critically with various Green New Deal proposals and sketches out a radical alternative committed to degrowth, anti-imperialism and agro-ecology.
New York City and the Experience of Modernity, Fall session
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century; the black would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression – a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.” —Howard Zinn
This is a seminar about New York City and its people. It is not a study of architectural styles and objects, - although the physical stuff of cities does play a role—but it is a course about the experience of the way in which modernity builds and destroys cities.
The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon with Alessandro Delfanti
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants“Delfanti has done here what more critics of Amazon should — listen carefully to the people whose work makes the corporation function. Those of us fighting for a better future than Amazon's dystopia have much to learn from this book”. — Dania Rajendra, Inaugural Director, Athena Coalition
The Invention of the White Race
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsTheodore W. Allen spent 30 years researching the primary sources and writing The Invention of the White Race (2 volumes), which provides a historical materialist analysis of racial oppression and the white identity which emerged as a principal form of social control over rebellious laboring class of European and Africans in the pattern setting colonies of Virginia and Maryland in the late 17th early 18th century.