October 2021
Revolution in the Virocene: Near (or Nearing) the End of Time
In an instant, the mantra of there is no alternative has been replaced by whatever happens, nothing will ever be the same. The ideology that says radical transformation is unrealistic has been irrevocably discredited. The bonds and rituals of everyday life have been loosened, fragmented and disjointed. What seemed inevitable and iron clad now feels flimsy as nation states globally scramble to find solutions that don’t exist. This opens up a space for thinking, and for politics. This new situation underscores a critical need for both practical intervention and an attempt at building a convergent philosophy that anticipates the praxis of the future.
Find out more »Diary of a Digital Plague Year with Dennis Broe
DENNIS BROE, author of Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and The End of Leisure, will be talking about his new book Diary of a Digital Plague Year: Corona Culture, Serial TV and The Rise of The Streaming Services. The book offers a blow-by-blow account of the ongoing confinement, charting the changes in our lives exacerbated by the coronavirus. Corona culture is a digital culture extraordinaire for some, while for others it has increased panic and terror about being at work.
Find out more »Catastrophe and Systemic Change: Learning from the Grenfell Tower Fire and Other Disasters
Author Gill Kernick will present her powerful analysis of the Grenfell disaster and its aftermath. The recent fire of a tower block is a sharp reminder that many residential structures will fail—witness the Miami collapse and the recent apartment collapses In Milano, Italy.
Find out more »James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-38
Situating this dissident communist movement within the history of class struggle, both national and international, Palmer examines how Cannon and others fought to revive a combative trade unionism, thwart fascism and the drift to war, refuse Stalinism’s many degenerations, and build a new Party and a new International, both of which would be dedicated to reviving and realizing the possibilities of revolutionary socialism.
Find out more »First They Took Rome with author David Broder
Studying the rise of forces like Matteo Salvini’s Lega, this book shows how the populist right drew on a deep well of social despair, ignored by the liberal center. Italy’s recent history is a warning from the future—the story of a collapse of public life that risks spreading across the West. First They Took Rome offers this perspective: Italy isn’t failing to keep up with its international peers but farther along the same path of decline they are following. In the 1980s, Italy boasted the West’s strongest Communist Party; today, social solidarity is collapsing, working people feel ever more atomized, and democratic institutions grow increasingly hollow.
Find out more »November 2021
Value, Fictitious Capital and Finance. The Timelessness of Karl Marx’s Capital with John Milios
Starting from his value-form analysis in Part One of Volume 1 of Capital, Marx develops the concept of “fictitious capital” in Volume 3, which depicts the role of interest-bearing capital and the financial sphere. Marx’s analysis allows for an understanding of contemporary capitalism, financialization and crisis: financialization cannot be isolated from “real” economy; it should be conceived as a “technology” of exercising capitalist power and hegemony over the working classes and the society as a whole. Marx’s analysis provides the terms to rethink the contemporary neoliberal form of capitalism and its crisis as expressions of the contradictions inherent in the organization of capitalist power.
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