Existentialism, Anti-Psychiatry: 1960s and beyond
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyne 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.
Challenging Militarism, Climate Change, and Human Nature
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynOur ability to address urgent threats to our existence like climate change and nuclear weapons is hampered and undermined by questionable assumptions about "human nature" that underlie much political thought and action.... "There will be no liberation without us knowing how to depend on each other, how to be encumbered with and responsible for each other."
Fascism: Then and Now
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynDiscuss the meaning and signficance of fascism and how to recognize it and struggle against it in world politics today. We hope to debate questions such as: What is the nature of fascism in relation to nationalism/racism, misogyny, social/community dissolution?
Syriza Wave with Helena Sheehan
King Juan Carlos 1 Center at NYU 53 Washington Square South, New York, United StatesHelena Sheehan, author of the new book The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left will speak. She will be joined by Nantina Vgontzas, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, ... Read more
The German Revolution: False Hope or Missed Chance
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn...Over the next nine years, while the German Left became more bitterly divided than ever, the extreme nationalist and revanchist element in Germany was coalescing around a new mass party, the Nazis, who found increasing numbers of powerful supporters in the army and among the capitalists.
Paris, May 1968
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynThis talk will investigate the events May 1968 in France through an analysis of the writings of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the most important and interesting of its leaders, as well as the experiences of rank and file militants
The Condition of the Working Class in England
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynThis reading group is taking a close look at Engels' master work, to help understand how the formation of industrial capital and the industrial working class in the nineteenth century has led us to the current conjuncture in contemporary capitalism — characterized by growing inequality, increasing precariousness for nearly everyone except the capitalist elite, and incessant attacks on the most vulnerable — and explore its lessons for our revolutionary politics in the twenty-first century.
Creating an Ecological Society
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynSickened by the contamination of water, air, and the Earth itself, more and more people are coming to realize that it is capitalism that is, quite literally, killing us - and indeed, degrading the Earth’s very ability to support all forms of life.
A New Left Forms, June and July sessions on the 1960s
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynThe bee on wheels has laments on a stick
Wags weepy banners with gypsy ribbons ...
The tiny wheeled bee has the sky on a stick
Idly waves as she buzzes through the afternoon
Kicking the tears around like bean tins.
—fragment of poem by Jeff Nuttall
Marxism / Leninism • Reform / Revolution • Role of a Vanguard Party
How do we develop a political organization capable of avoiding the same traps of the past? Are communist parties inevitably social democratic and bureaucratic? Can existing parties in the US be saved? In this panel, Marxist organizations come together to learn from the experience in India and elsewhere. This public event is both a workshop and a frank and sober discussion about the road ahead.
Trotsky in New York Walking Tour
We will meet at the entrance to the Great Hall of Cooper Union and proceed to 77 St. Marks Place, where the offices of the Russian language newspaper Novy Mir, were housed in 1917. Here Trotsky and other future Bolshevik leaders worked daily. From there the tour will take a walk to the building of the Jewish Daily Forward.
Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity
Verso Books 20 Jay Street #1010, Brooklyn...a Marxian version of Freudian free association—the chain of hidden links that leads us from the surface of everyday life and experience to the very sources of production itself. —Fredric Jameson
Gowanus Canal Walking Tour: Where Environmental Justice and Housing Justice Meet
Gowanus is an intensely contaminated community that is simultaneously undergoing multiple processes of environmental remediation and gentrification. The tour will explore these dynamics and the challenges and opportunities posed by the Gowanus Canal Superfund Clean Up.
Kluge’s News From Ideological Antiquity. Part 2: All Things Are Bewitched People
Verso Books 20 Jay Street #1010, Brooklyn“Commodified things are not thingly, they are crystallized human characteristics, metamorphosed human beings.” —Alexander Kluge
Reading Capital Politically
Brooklyn Commons 388 Atlantic Avenue, BrooklynMarx’s maxim that class struggle is the “motor force” of history is to be taken literally and not viewed as simply some literary metaphor. But what does this mean in the real world? How does this work? And, how should we read Capital politically?