Race and Class
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?
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.
Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBlack Reconstruction 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.”
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.
Capital, Volume 1, Part 3
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsChapters 16 through 25, will trace this development and reveals new dynamics and contradictions inherent to the logic of capitalist accumulation, culminating in Chapter 25, The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. These developmental processes continue to be played out to this day and are witnessed in the immensity of wealth for a few at one pole of humanity, poverty at another, ruthless misuse and degradation of nature, and reduction of the human subject, the producing masses of real individuals, to an alienated object for capitalist exploitation.
Left Populism in Europe: Lessons From Jeremy Corbyn to Podemos
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBringing a wealth of experience in political organizing, Marina Prentoulis argues that left populism is a political logic that brings together isolated demands against a common enemy. She looks at how egalitarian pluralism could transform economic and political institutions in a radical, democratic direction. But each party does this differently, and the key to understanding where to go from here lies in a serious analysis of the roots of each movement's base, the forms of party organization, and the particular national contexts. This book is a clear and holistic approach to left populism that will inform anyone wanting to understand and move forward positively during this bleak time for the left in Europe.
Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAndrew Kolin presents a detailed explanation of the essential elements that characterize capital’s relations to the working class and how capital relies on various forms of repressing reform and revolutionary movements by workers. The repression is directly linked to the class struggle between capital and labor. The starting point examines labor repression after the American Revolution. Andrew’s book then follows the role of the state along with the explosive growth of American capitalism to analyze the long history of capital and labor conflict with details of the US state being aligned with the interests of capital throughout American history.
Urban Displacements and Contemporary Capitalism
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsSusanne Soederberg argues that historical and geographical configurations of monetized governance, including landlords, employers and inter-scalar state practices, have served to reproduce urban displacements and obfuscate their gendered, class and racialized underpinnings. The outcome is the everyday facilitation and normalization of urban poverty and social marginalization on one side, and capital accumulation on the other.
Grundrisse: The Chapter on Money (The first two notebooks)
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants“Forces of production and social relations - two different sides of the development of the social individual - appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high...” —Karl Marx, The Grundrisse
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.”
Parade of the Old New with artist/author Zoe Beloff
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsA discussion by Zoe Beloff about her new 40-panel accordion book that reproduces, Parade of the Old New, an epic panorama on cardboard panels, a 40 meter long allegory of the American body politic. The title is taken from a 1938 poem by Bertolt Brecht that inspired the theme of this work; now more than ever, we are not finished with the past and the past is not finished with us. The project was launched with Trump's inauguration and continued until he was defeated at the ballot box. It begins with the president's triumphal entry into Washington DC.Parade of the Old New is distributed by Booklyn, Inc. (booklyn.org). Booklyn also represents Beloff's work within the library and academic market.
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.