Race and Class
Towards a Revolution in Labor History
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA reading of Theodore W. Allen's unpublished manuscript, "Towards a Revolution in Labor History," convened with Sean Ahern. According to Allen, "the original sin of 'white' labor historiography lies in the misbegotten concept that excludes the Black bond-laborers from the 'working class.'”
The Fallout of War: Chronologies of Conflict
Video available on YouTubeIn the first of two linked sessions, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture presents their collective research on a keyword of contemporary cultural studies - war - and investigates its many valences as lived reality and as metaphor. Taking account of war as constitutive of the present, the working group explores war's myriad meanings.
The Fallout of War: Metonyms of Militarism
Video available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/h0dYxI2zDoY
In the second of two linked sessions, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture presents their collective research on a keyword of contemporary cultural studies - war - and investigates its many valences as lived reality and as metaphor. Taking account of war as constitutive of the present, the working group explores war's myriad meanings.
‘The Man Who Changed Colors’
Video available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/ABOczzUs8nQ
Bill Fletcher Jr's 'The Man Who Changed Colors' delves into the complicated relationships between Cape Verdean Americans and African Americans, Portuguese fascist gangs, and abusive shipyard working conditions. When a dockworker falls to his death under strange circumstances, investigative journalist David Gomes is on the case. His dogged pursuit of the truth puts his life in danger and upends the scrappy Cape Cod newspaper he works for.
Reading Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA close reading over 10 weeks of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic work, Black Reconstruction, with Sean Ahern. The book provides a basis for a much overdue revolution in US labor history. As Du Bois so eloquently and bluntly put in in 1935: “The South, after the war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see again for many decades. Yet, the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”
Reading Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA close reading over 10 weeks of W.E.B. Du Bois's classic work, Black Reconstruction, with Sean Ahern. The book provides a basis for a much overdue revolution in US labor history. As Du Bois so eloquently and bluntly put in in 1935: “The South, after the war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see again for many decades. Yet, the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”
Summertime … and the Living Ain’t Easy: Black Noir
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe Marxist Education Project's Literature Group continues its summertime tradition of reading noir fiction: the popular American crime genre that explores the corruption of society - and, in our selected books by Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, and Bill Fletcher Jr. - corruption in the workplace, in unions, and among workers.
Reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe continue to study selected passages from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We delve into key themes and concepts related to civil society and state: politics and the arts, racism, class and gender, religion, linguistics, and other methods of analysis, critical theory, mass media, and cinema, hegemony, and subaltern studies, as well as the role of intellectuals and activists in discovering new methods and languages to be transformative.
Imperialism: The Long View and the Big Picture
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsIn eight weekly sessions guided by Dan La Botz, we will look at imperialism in the long view, from the ancient world to today. We will examine the experience of imperialism and the theoretical justifications for it, as well as anti-imperialist movements and their arguments. We will look at imperialism as economic phenomenon, as political strategy, as cultural experience, and as psychological affect. We will discuss imperialism and gender and imperialism and the environment.
Theodore Allen’s ‘The Kernel and Meaning’: A Strategic Critique of U.S. Labor History
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore Theodore W. Allen turned to his magnum opus, The Invention of the White Race, he drafted an essay "The Kernel and Meaning: A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of U.S. Historiography." In it, he assessed how the industrial bourgeoisie successfully overturned plantation capital's rule while assuring its own ascendancy over the proletariat. Allen reviewed six commonly held explanations as to why, despite favorable objective conditions, the U.S. left and workers movements failed to establish socialism or even a permanent working-class party. Participants in this group will read and discuss the original, 160-page typescript of Allen's unpublished essay.
Commons, Commoning, Communism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore the advent of capitalism, much of humanity produced their immediate livelihoods on lands and with tools to which they either had rights of use or held as individual property. All that came to a violent end with what Marx preferred to call the "original expropriation" (often misleadingly termed "primitive accumulation"). This reading group will explore the historical roots and persistence of such crimes and the resistance they evoke by reading together Ian Angus's recently published The War Against the Commons, Peter Linebaugh's Stop Thief! and related texts.
Reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWe continue to study selected passages from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. We delve into key themes and concepts related to civil society and state: politics and the arts, racism, class and gender, religion, linguistics, and other methods of analysis, critical theory, mass media, and cinema, hegemony, and subaltern studies, as well as the role of intellectuals and activists in discovering new methods and languages to be transformative.
Blood and Fire: The Violent Origins of Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsJoin the MEP's Capital Study Group in a four-week study of the concluding section of volume I of Marx's Capital, which discloses the widespread violence and dispossession - in both Europe and colonized areas - that accompanied the emergence of capitalism.
Oppression and Resistance in New Chinese and Chinese-American Science Fiction
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBefore Theodore W. Allen turned to his magnum opus, The Invention of the White Race, he drafted an essay "The Kernel and Meaning: A Contribution to a Proletarian Critique of U.S. Historiography." In it, he assessed how the industrial bourgeoisie successfully overturned plantation capital's rule while assuring its own ascendancy over the proletariat. Allen reviewed six commonly held explanations as to why, despite favorable objective conditions, the U.S. left and workers movements failed to establish socialism or even a permanent working-class party. Participants in this group will read and discuss the original, 160-page typescript of Allen's unpublished essay.
Late Fascism: a Conversation With Alberto Toscano
Video available on YouTubeIn 'Late Fascism' Alberto Toscano asks, how should we name, map and respond to the present state of affairs where the forces of authoritarianism and reaction seem to have the upper hand? Drawing especially on Black radical and anticolonial theories of fascism, Toscano makes clear the limits of associating fascism primarily with the kinds of political violence experienced in past European regimes. He argues that we should see fascism as a changing process, a threat anchored in racial and colonial capitalism, which continues to evolve in the present day.