The Life and Thought of Louis-Auguste Blanqui
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn...during his lifetime, Blanqui was a towering figure of revolutionary courage and commitment as he organized nearly a half-dozen failed revolutionary conspiracies and spent half of his life in jail. He inspired revolutionary actions from the late 1820s until his death in 1881 and beyond.
The Emancipation of Labor
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynNorthern workers “took up arms because they understood the importance of the conflict in shaping the future value of ‘free labor,’” and a “rolling strike of the slaves” in the South became “the great incontrovertible and irreversible fact of the war”.
Emergence of a New Left: The Black Panther Party (extended to April 11)
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynFrom the time that college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves and announced that they were going to patrol the police and fight police brutality, a cultural match was lit that sparked a revolution.
The Three Worlds of Social Democracy
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynThe Three Worlds of Social Democracy offers cutting-edge case studies to present a truly global exploration of the methods, meanings, and limits of social democracy. It also explores the potential for left alternatives to social democracy and the dangers of surging right-wing populism.
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
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYI 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.