Past Events

This three-week session will focus on the General Laws of Capitalist Accumulation as we return from the winter holiday. By unraveling the commoditized forms of our interactions with nature and each other, it provides tools to understand capitalism’s astounding innovativeness and productivity, intertwined with growing inequality and misery, alienation, stunting of human potential, and ecological destruction all over the globe.

Ray Patton argues that punk eroded the boundaries and political categories that defined the Cold War Era, replacing them with a new framework based on identity as conservative or progressive. Through this paradigm shift, punk unwittingly ushered in a new era of global neoliberalism.

Nine years ago the anti-bourgeois film festival began at the Brecht Forum to get to nights like this, where films as profound as The Battle of Algiers and Burn! could be viewed and then discussed, not merely consumed.

Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of doing that.

Thompson combines scholarship and grassroots grit to disabuse us of cherished certainties. Whether uncovering the unrealized promise buried in mainstream cultural offerings or tracing our course toward the moment of reckoning ahead, the essays in Premonitions are both practical investigations and provocations.

... multidimensional critique of capitalism puts our present conjuncture into broader perspective, enabling diagnoses of the recent resurgence of right-wing populism and suggesting what is required of a viable Left alternative.

Join us for a close reading of Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory which shows how different historical regimes of capitalism have relied on institutional separations between economy and polity, production and social reproduction, and human and non-human nature. Interaction between these domains is periodically readjusted in response to crises and upheavals.

The seismic tremors that the October Revolution sent through Germany, Hungary and Italy are well known to students of the post-World War One Europe. Less familiar is the fact that the revolution’s ripple effects were felt as far to the west as Ireland. This April will mark the centennial of an episode in Irish revolutionary history known at the time—and since—as the Limerick Soviet.