Bertolucci’s 1900
The thick-layered chronicle doesn't sweep across time so much as it escorts the audience through indelible composite events that bristle with personal, social, and political characteristics….Since 1900 has come to stand as an organic cinematic journey through chapters of a rich apocryphal history that evinces an ongoing struggle between the world's rich elite and everyone else.”—Cole Smithey
Capital: A Review of Volumes 1 and 2
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesIn review of Volumes One and Two of Capital and in preparation for our study of Volume 3 we will have a 4 week intersession reading from Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho’s Karl Marx’s Capital. These sessions are suggested as a good review for those who would like to join in for the coming sessions of our close reading of Volume 3 which will begin on January 18. Of course, anyone interested in a review of Capital and/or would simply like to read and discuss the Fine and Saad-Filho book are encouraged to attend as well.
Crises and Uprisings in Latin America Today
Join us for a closer look at the political and economic background to dramatic recent events in Latin America, where a tremendous struggle is taking place between popular movements opposed to neoliberalism and authoritarianism, and capitalist elites determined to defend their profits and privileges.
Capital: A Review of Volumes 1 and 2
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesIn review of Volumes One and Two of Capital and in preparation for our study of Volume 3 we will have a 4 week intersession reading from Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho’s Karl Marx’s Capital. These sessions are suggested as a good review for those who would like to join in for the coming sessions of our close reading of Volume 3 which will begin on January 18. Of course, anyone interested in a review of Capital and/or would simply like to read and discuss the Fine and Saad-Filho book are encouraged to attend as well.
Crises and Uprisings in Latin America Today
Join us for a closer look at the political and economic background to dramatic recent events in Latin America, where a tremendous struggle is taking place between popular movements opposed to neoliberalism and authoritarianism, and capitalist elites determined to defend their profits and privileges.
Antiquity Now: 3 Robert Graves Novels
To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.
Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours…
—To Bring the Dead to Life, Robert Graves
Any 2 Classes (Winter 2020 Discount)
Beginning this January through April of 2020 any two classes may be attended for a reduced price. For example, one may attend “Unearthing the Grundrisse” on Monday and “Capital Volume 3” on Saturday for a combined reduced price according to the level of sliding scale you wish to contribute.
Capital, Volume 3
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesVolume III integrates and completes the analysis of the process of capitalist production as a whole, enabling us to understand and make sense of how each of the appearances and processes we see occurring on the surface of society are related to the whole. When we do so all the laws of motion previously revealed in the first two volumes take on new dimensions. Internal dynamics and contradictions burst out and situate humanity withina historical process that calls us to figure out how to go beyond capital and develop the conditions that insure that the development of each is the precondition for the development of all.
Invention of the White Race
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesThe Invention of the White Race Volumes I & II, Theodore W. Allen's historical materialist analysis of racial slavery, documents how the plantation elite put in place this system of social control following Bacon's Rebellion of 1676. In the final stage of this uprising, an army of European and African chattel bond laborers burned Jamestown to the ground and temporarily drove Governor Berkeley into exile across the Chesapeake Bay.The terrified planter bourgeoisie, in a deliberate response to this display of labor solidarity, enacted a series of laws and practices in the late 17th and early 18th centuries which implanted a system of 'white' racial privileges that enabled the imposition of racial slavery and white male supremacy.
Technology, Science and Capitalism
What is technology? Does technological change drive social change? Is technology independent of social relations? What are the consequences of “technological progress” under capitalism? What constraints does capitalism place on such progress?
American Writing: Changing Locations
Season 1: Changing Places in America
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (1857). John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Lisa Ko, The Leavers (2017)
In his 1970 essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” William Gass brought the term “metafiction” forward to the reading public as a way to characterize the work writers such as Borges, Barth, Flann O’Brien, as well as the type of novels Gass himself would write. He described metafiction as writing “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed”. Does metafiction provide escape for the committed writer from the bourgeois strictures that the novel form imposes? As critical readers we need to check out all the angles. The metafiction form will over time become incorporated as yet another aspect of modern fiction as ultimately there is no way to over-ride what happens when ink is committed to paper, impulses to the interactive screen.
American fiction writers have lots to write about. We are introducing a four term look at writing by American authors who have novels appropriate to four themes important to critical thinkers of the broad American questions on nation, class, race and gender. Much of this fiction becomes part of what our unfolding reality is as a nation, group of nations, as aspiring internationalists. Many of the fictional works we will read are not as formally postmodern or would formally fall in the metafiction category as delineated by Barth.
Capital, Volume 3
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesVolume III integrates and completes the analysis of the process of capitalist production as a whole, enabling us to understand and make sense of how each of the appearances and processes we see occurring on the surface of society are related to the whole. When we do so all the laws of motion previously revealed in the first two volumes take on new dimensions. Internal dynamics and contradictions burst out and situate humanity withina historical process that calls us to figure out how to go beyond capital and develop the conditions that insure that the development of each is the precondition for the development of all.
Hispaniola in Revolt
New Perspectives Theatre 456-458 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United Stateshe panel will look at the current Haitian political crisis and popular revolt; the Haitian revolution, its emancipatory legacy of liberation and contradictions; the lessons of the 1946 and 1986 revolts in Haiti; race and class in Santo Domingo; the 1965 Dominican revolution as well as prospects for cross-border and international solidarity and revolution on the island and beyond.
Unearthing The Grundrisse (continuation)
After the defeat of the 1848-50 revolutions in Europe, Marx acknowledged that he failed to provide an adequate analysis of the economic foundation of society and turned from a focus on organizing to an intense, life-long study of political economy. Catalyzed by the first global economic crisis in 1857 and after 10 years of concentrated study, he started the first of seven notebooks to self-clarify his work up to that point. Not published or available outside the USSR until 1953, Martin Nicolaus provided the first—and only —English translation of all seven notebooks in 1973 as the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.
Invention of the White Race
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesThe Invention of the White Race Volumes I & II, Theodore W. Allen's historical materialist analysis of racial slavery, documents how the plantation elite put in place this system of social control following Bacon's Rebellion of 1676. In the final stage of this uprising, an army of European and African chattel bond laborers burned Jamestown to the ground and temporarily drove Governor Berkeley into exile across the Chesapeake Bay.The terrified planter bourgeoisie, in a deliberate response to this display of labor solidarity, enacted a series of laws and practices in the late 17th and early 18th centuries which implanted a system of 'white' racial privileges that enabled the imposition of racial slavery and white male supremacy.