Frederick Douglass Walk in Brooklyn
Brooklyn Borough Hall StepsThis talk will cover the locations where Frederick Douglass organized and met with abolitionists before the Civil War and other areas of the downtown area of Brooklyn where Douglass made appearances. Note that the date has changed from March 18 to April 1.
Small is Necessary: Shared Housing on a Shared Planet
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynThe solutions that will be analyzed are not just smaller dwellings in compact settlements but also shared spaces and facilities. The presentation will look at a range of practical options from co-living in a household to cohousing and ecovillages, weighing up the pros and cons of the tiny house movement and assessing the potential and limits of radical squats along the way.
Money and Totality
Unnameable Books 600 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, NYCorrecting a longstanding misinterpretation, Moseley argues that there is no ‘transformation problem’ in Marx’s economic theory.
Sartre’s Search For A Method
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn“Sartre insists that history is the history of human initiatives. What emerges as the crucial problem is how to map the jungle of obscure connections between historical movements and individual actions.” —Ronald Hayman
The Explosion of Deferred Dreams
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynCallahan’s meticulous, impassioned arguments both expose and reframe the political and social context for the San Francisco Sound and the vibrant subcultural uprisings with which it is associated.
African Literature: Post-Colonial Struggles
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynDuring this term we will begin with Egypt with Mahfouz, visit West Africa with Chris Abani then travel south to South Africa with Zakes Mda then conclude in June with NoViolet Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Again we examine four different areas of Africa as the peoples there emerge first from European colonization, then face the forces of global domination in the long late-capitalist neoliberal phase we are living through.
The Grundrisse, The Chapter on Capital
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynMarx 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.
Creating An Ecological Society
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynWith Fred Magdoff —co-author with Chris Williams of the new book Creating an Ecological Society, which assesses how capitalism is destabilizing Earth’s climate and envisions a society that is genuinely democratic, equitable, and ecologically sustainable.
60s New Left: National and International
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked....yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, —from Ginsberg’s Howl
Reading “Finally Got The News”: 3rd Sessions, Part 4
Interference Archive 131 8th Street, No. 4, Brooklyn, NY, United StatesThis reading group, designed to accompany Interference Archives’ exhibit Finally Got The News will explore some of the key liberation movements of the 1970s U.S. through the lens of written documents included in the exhibition, as well as excerpts from publications by the activists and intellectuals who led, chronicled and theorized about them. This is not a nostalgia trip, but an opportunity to critically examine some important and often-overlooked threads of our collective history in order to inform our own politics of liberation in the 21st century.
Existentialism and the Anti-Psychiatry Movement
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynWe are normal, and we want our freedom!
We will read a selection of this new approach to psychic individuation alongside the Laing/Cooper nexus that sprung the anti-psychiatry movement and resulted in open psychiatric institutions, mental health liberation activity, and an on-going critique of “bourgeois” psychiatry and contemporary behaviorism, cognitive and psycho-pharmacological approaches to the question of what is mental health.
2 More Lectures With Stanley Aronowitz are postponed
2067 Broadway between 71st and 72nd Streets, New York, NY, United StatesSponsored and presented by the Institute for the Radical Imagination May 13 Lecture: The Labor Question in the 21st century May 20 Lecture: Political Organization? Both lectures will take place ... Read more
Existentialism, Anti-Psychiatry: 1960s and beyond
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyne will read a selection of this new approach to psychic individuation alongside the Laing/Cooper nexus that sprung the anti-psychiatry movement and resulted in open psychiatric institutions, mental health liberation activity, and an on-going critique of “bourgeois” psychiatry and contemporary behaviorism.
Challenging Militarism, Climate Change, and Human Nature
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynOur ability to address urgent threats to our existence like climate change and nuclear weapons is hampered and undermined by questionable assumptions about "human nature" that underlie much political thought and action.... "There will be no liberation without us knowing how to depend on each other, how to be encumbered with and responsible for each other."
Fascism: Then and Now
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynDiscuss the meaning and signficance of fascism and how to recognize it and struggle against it in world politics today. We hope to debate questions such as: What is the nature of fascism in relation to nationalism/racism, misogyny, social/community dissolution?