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.
2 More Lectures With Stanley Aronowitz are postponed
2067 Broadway between 71st and 72nd Streets, New York, NY, United StatesSponsored and presented by the Institute for the Radical Imagination May 13 Lecture: The Labor Question in the 21st century May 20 Lecture: Political Organization? Both lectures will take place ... Read more
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.