Science and Technology
Friedrich Engels with Terrell Carver and Kaan Kangal
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAll three author/editors celebrate the recent 200th birthday of Engels looking at his youthful works, his early relationship with Karl Marx, address controversy surrounding his Dialectics of Nature and give a broad reassessment of the importance of Engels pithing Marxisms, working class movements, science, philosophy and more.
Health Care, Technology, and Socialized Medicine with Pratyush and Pritha Chandra
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFor the ecological crisis to become a ground to rethink structural transformation, it is not enough to locate it in the wreckage that capitalism accumulates. It must be understood as constitutive to capitalist social relations, having an intimate connection to the robbery of labor. It is in this sense that the particularization of these crises in the form of pathogens and impending diseases becomes crucial. This helps us to understand the ecological rift as central to everyday life and struggle in capitalism, and also to imagine a transformational class politics.
Socialist Register 2021: Life After the Pandemic with Christoph Hermann
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhile debt is essential in a profit-driven economy, it is pointless in a needs-based economy. When the goal is that everybody receives what she/he needs, there is no need to go into debt. In this presentation Christoph will present some ideas for a needs-based economy.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: The Mass Strike Past and Present
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe speakers in this fourth session reposition Rosa Luxemburg's analysis in the contexts of the United States Civil War, the Arab Spring, and the twenty-first century migrations northward through the American hemisphere.
Socialist Register 2021: Beyond Digital Capitalism (the entire series)
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBeyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living Continues on April 27 with another final session on May 2 There are tickets for each session for those who are unable to be present for this series. The series tickets provide entrance to the remaining 6 presentations with discussions. “In addressing how far digital technology has become ... Read more
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.
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.
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.
Capitalism and the Sea
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhile sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of carbon civilization – warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere.
New York City and the Experience of Modernity
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis 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.
Modernity is a historical force. It is messy. In architecture history modernity is usually narrated as an interplay between the combined forces of the Industrial Revolution and capital, with social upheaval, explosive population growth and immigration as its result...
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.