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The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

The story of the Benin Bronzes — carried off by the British in 1897 — sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonization of museums. In “The Brutish Museums”, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.

$7 – $32

The Sinking Middle Class with David Roediger

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

Roediger demonstrates that an obsession with a “middle class” is relatively new in US politics, starting with Bill Clinton's attempt to win back the so-called Reagan Democrats. The efforts by the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party remain marked by covert appeals to white racism and the avoidance of wealth redistribution.

$7 – $11

Socialists on Social Media Platforms and Imagine Platform Socialism

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

While digital platforms are enabling socialists to communicate in ways that were not possible in the pre-digital world of mass media, they are supplements to – not substitutes for – building democratic and sustainable socialist organizations and militant working-class movements.

$7 – $11
Event Series A People’s Guide to Capitalism

A People’s Guide to Capitalism

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

Despite the efforts of mainstream commentators to convince us otherwise, many are asking questions about why the capitalist system has produced such vast inequality and wanton disregard for its own environmental destruction. This book offers answers to exactly these questions on their own terms: in the form of a radical economic theory. The 14-week class which begins in early January will feature a close reading and discussion of the entire book with explication and references to additional materials related to this study.

$20 – $60

A New Digital Taylorism? with Matt Cole, Hugo Radice, Charles Umney

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

In his analysis of the workplace, Marx concludes that “Large-scale industry possesses in the machine system an entirely objective organization of production, which confronts the worker as a pre-existing material condition of production:”, and defines this condition as the real subsumption of labor. A hundred years later, his analysis informed modern socialist studies of labor and the struggle for workplace.

$7 – $28

Empire’s Endgame with Gargi Bhattacharyya and co-authors including Adam Elliott-Cooper, Sita Balani and others

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

Engaging with Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements, “Empire's Endgame: Racism and The British State” offers an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalization, and a political vision that includes — rather than expels — in the face of crisis.

$7 – $25

Empire’s Endgame: Pluto FireWorks series book + talk special

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

Bringing to the fore broad political and economic contexts, the authors trace ways in which empire’s legacies have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and instability in the nation-state. Engaging with Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements, Empire's Endgame offers an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalisation, and a political vision that includes — rather than expels — in the face of crisis.

$25 – $31

Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality. A discussion of Volume 2 with Jeff B. Perry

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

In this second volume of his acclaimed biography, Jeffrey B. Perry traces the final decade of Harrison’s life, from 1918 to 1927. Perry details Harrison’s literary and political activities, foregrounding his efforts against white supremacy and for racial consciousness and unity in struggles for equality and radical social change. The book explores Harrison’s role in the militant New Negro Movement and the International Colored Unity League.

$7 – $11

M.A.D. Lit 101: American Fiction and the Cold War

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

A reading and discussion of three substantive novels that explain the context of anti-communism as it raged in the years immediately following World War II, has continued throughout the decades since then, and remains strong throughout American culture and popular consciousness today.

$25 – $55

The Big Tech Monopolies and the State with Grace Blakeley

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

As the effects of the coronavirus pandemic swept through the global economy, the average observer could have been forgiven for missing a critical piece of news: by May 2020, the combined market capitalization of the four largest US tech companies reached one fifth of the entire S&P 500. Four companies – Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook – now account for 20 per cent of the combined value of the 500 largest US corporations – an unparalleled level of market concentration. Forty years these corporate entitites were either just beyond being plucky start-ups, or did not even exist.

$7 – $11

The Last Years of Karl Marx: A new reading group

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

With The Last Years of Karl Marx, Marcello Musto claims a renewed relevance for the late work of Marx, highlighting unpublished or previously neglected writings, many of which remain unavailable in English. Readers are invited to reconsider Marx’s critique of European colonialism, his ideas on non-Western societies, and his theories on the possibility of revolution in non-capitalist countries. From Marx’s late manuscripts, notebooks, and letters emerge an author markedly different from the one represented by many of his contemporary critics and followers alike.

$15 – $55

150th Anniversary of the Paris Commune

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

Please join us on March 18 –the date the uprising began – as Mitch Abidor, editor and translator of two books on the fighters in the 1871 uprising, Communards and Voices of the Paris Commune, recounts what happened over the 71 days that followed, in all its complexity, both its heroism and its failings, as well as its role as inspiration with lessons for the movements that followed in its footsteps.

$7 – $11

Marx and Emancipatory Political Theory

Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participants

This panel will conside George Comninel’s “Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx”, “Marxism versus Liberalism” by August Nimtz and “Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism” by Igor Shoikhedbrod

$7 – $11