Finally Got The News (at Interference Archive)
FINALLY GOT THE NEWS uncovers the hidden legacy of the radical left of the 1970s, a decade when vibrant social movements challenged racism, imperialism, patriarchy and capitalism itself. It uses original printed materials—from pamphlets to posters, flyers to record albums—to tell this politically rich and little-known story.
Germany 1918-1924: False Hope or Missed Chance?
The communists of Germany now struggled to reconnect with the German working class and rebuild a revolutionary movement in the Weimar Republic, a society that was, on the one hand, striving to return to normalcy and, on the other hand, slipped easily and often into economic and political chaos. They fought, but they lost. In the process, the working class was divided and demoralized, the capitalist class went looking for a savior, and the foundations of Nazism were laid.
Biology as Means of Production and Ideology
This talk will report on the current biotechnological landscape and describe challenges to its enabling genetic determinist ideology from dialectical and multi-causal explanatory modes within the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology.
WINTER 2017 CLASSES BEGIN NOW
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Introduction to Marxism
In this course we will be concerned with some of the main ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, focusing on the materialist understanding of history, and the theory of surplus value.
Life, the Universe and Everything
We will conclude by tying the idea of the cosmos as a living system of dynamic evolving complexity to the Notion in Hegel’s Logic and from there to an interpretation of Marx’s Capital that places it firmly within the same Hegelian dialectic that is being developed in contemporary cosmology.
The Emergence of a New Left
“The free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” ― Herbert Marcuse
“Disaffiliation was deliberate, and conscious, even self-conscious, among the demonstrators who appreared in the fifties—unavoidably, disaffiliation is a prerequisite of protest.” —Jeffrey Nuttall, Bomb Culture
Highlights of Capital, Volume 1
CAPITAL is the indispensable sourcebook on Marx’s method for analyzing the economy, politics and struggles. Many of us have less time to study it because, as Marx predicted, we have to work longer hours— and often more than one job—in order to survive. Fortunately, even a basic familiarity with the key concepts of Volume I offers many tools for understanding capitalism’s dynamics.
African Literature: Colonialism, Liberation, Disillusionment
With the reading of novels by Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Tayeb Salih (Sudan), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria) and Ngugu wa Thiong’o (Kenya), we examine four different areas of Africa as the peoples there emerge from European colonization. We witness the struggles of workers on strike before their full independence, anti-colonial resistance spanning from Mount Kenya to academic circles in London. As nations become independent we discover new and recycled forms of oppression, exploitation and war. In the midst of disillusionment, we see resolve and signs of what remains possible.
Integrating Social and Natural Systems
...this course will focus on key concepts in Earth system science (water, air, soil, and life) and systems thinking. Gaining a perspective of how we exist in the natural world even in built environments influences the framing of questions and then how these questions might be answered in order to understand ways we can become sustainable and resilient societies.
Marx’s Grundrisse
Marx viewed all his economic laws as tendencies and it is hard to deny that those tendencies are becoming more and more the realities of today’s capitalism. However, to understand our society we need to do more than reading and accepting his concepts, we must critically analyze them and look for the way of thinking that produced them. It is with this goal in my mind that we should embark on a journey through the long and complex sentences of The German Ideology and the Grundrisse.
Working The Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centers
Interference Archive 131 8th Street, No. 4, Brooklyn, NY, United StatesThe talk includes three parts: first, it makes an argument for the use of workers’ inquiry as a method to study contemporary work conditions, in this case involving an undercover activist ethnography; second, it draws on heterodox and critical Marxist theory to understand the transformation of work; third, it focuses on the challenges of resistance and organization in contemporary work through a concrete example.
Ecological Imperialism, Settler Colonialism & Indigenous Resistance
This study group will use materials from the #StandingRockSyllabus and other readings to deepen our understanding of ecological imperialism, settler colonialism, and indigenous resistance. We will also critically examine the varied approaches that Marxists have taken toward these questions.
Marx and Engels: 1841-1844
This course will focus on two early works by Marx and one by Marx and Engels. The works by Marx are his doctoral dissertation of 1841 on ancient Greek atomistic theory and his Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” from 1843. The work by Marx and Engels is The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Critique of 1844.
Emergence of a New Left: Civil Rights from Reform to Revolution
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynIf we don't do something real soon, I think you'll have to agree that we're going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet. It's one or the other in 1964. It isn't that time is running out—time has run out! —Malcolm X, 1964