Zones of Liberation
Verso Books 20 Jay Street #1010, BrooklynEach decade going forward will lead to the demise of ever more species from the microbial to fully sentient beings like ourselves, all the result of the insatiable proliferation of the capitalists pursuit for ever greater profit and continuous expanding accumulation of their money capital even if to do so requires the end of life on this planet as we know it.
In response to this, The Marxist Education Project is closing this summer and revving up to meet the challenges of 2020 with an inaugural event on Global Capital and the Struggle for Socialism. We will begin on August 24 with an afternoon panel with Salonee Bhaman, George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici, Gabriel Rockhill and others, followed by evening workshop discussions.
Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Nada
Unnameable Books 600 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, NYWe are getting together to celebrate and discuss the release of Nada, but our subject will also include all the works of Manchette
Les Temps Modernes: The Early Decades
This class will examine the first decades of its existence, when such important works as Sartre’s What is Literature appeared in it, as well as the first installments of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It will focus on its political positions, as Sartre first attempted to set up a third-way party...
A Summer of Further Discontent: Noir Fiction and the City
This summer our noir group will visit our old stomping grounds of Los Angeles but will begin our summer of more discontent with Narcopolis, set in Mumbai, then after two stops in L.A. go off to Glasgow before dipping south to finish our summer in Paris with the soon-to-be-published Nada.
Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment
Morgan is both of its time and points forward to the darker popular culture that would ensue later that year and into 1968, the year of international youth revolution. Indeed, its popularity among the young may well have facilitated this radicalization, certainly within Britain. The film's depiction of madness is deliberately ambivalent. The inner logic of Morgan’s statements and his sure self-knowledge, as well as his rejection of the consumer society’s superficial trappings, mark him as the only sane character. —Jon Savage, The Guardian
Commie.con
New Perspectives Theatre 456-458 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesRespite from the huge comic.con at the Javits Center is this Commie.con. Panels you can hear and easily ask questions during. Interesting vending. Supports a vital theater and The MEP.
A Brief History of Class Warfare
The Empty Circle 499 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, NYA Brief History of Class Warfare will take place at an ongoing Aaron Burr Society exhibit at Empy Circle Space. Jim Costanzo will speak to his recent work as well as provide video and hand out FREE MONEY in the company of a whiskey still with a bottle
Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesA young executive hunts down his father’s killer in the scathing The Bad Sleep Well. Continuing his legendary collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa combines elements of Hamlet and American film noir to chilling effect in exposing the corrupt boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan.
Capital, Volume 2, Second Sessions
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesAfter solving the form that the production of wealth takes within a society where generalized commodity production prevails under the domination of capital —including the commodification of the capacities of the human subject and materials and powers of nature, the two sources of wealth, Marx takes on the next big question. How the hell can reproduction of society as a whole take place when there is no conscious social planning that insures that all needs are met and in the necessary proportions such that a continuous reproduction of the conditions of life can take place and reproduce the capitalist relations of production? By looking at capitalist social reproduction from this viewpoint, in Volume II we discover the solution to this problem while new internal contradictions and instabilities at a societal level inherent to this mode of production are explained.
Melancholia Africana
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United States...Etoke explores how diasporic Africans reconcile that which has been destroyed with what is newly introduced, framing this inherent tension as the character of Africana historical becoming. On October 30th, Etoke will read from and speak about her newly translated work while Lewis R. Gordon, who authored its new foreword, and Souleymane Bachir Diagne will address the continued relevance of its searching diagnoses.
The State and Strategies for Socialism
Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian’s essay Socialist Strategy and the Democratic Capitalist State examines the the state in its liberal-democratic form, arguing that we should move beyond both vanguardist and social democratic models toward a view of the state as a contradictory site of class and social struggles. Paul Christoher Gray’s article on Socialist Project is taken from his recently published From the Streets to the State: Changing the World by Taking Power, where he takes on the limitations of dual power and extra-parliamentarism and the flaws inherent in the electoralist approaches and where there can be some reconciliation of the best aspects of these tendencies.
Earth in Crisis: Staying With the Trouble
This reading group will consider how climate activists and critical thinkers can maintain equilibrium and avoid despair by “staying with the trouble” —Donna Haraway’s phrase for living through planetary chaos and struggling alongside our fellow human and nonhuman beings.
Psychology for Activists
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesHow do we integrate our understandings of how society changes and how individuals and small groups change? How do we recognize when the things getting in the way of our political effectiveness are not just the obvious obstacles but unprocessed past hurt from our own lives? How do racism, anti-Blackness, cis-hetero-patriarchy seep into our individual psychodynamics and group dynamics even as we are trying to overthrow these forms of oppression?
The Stuart Hall Project
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesAkomfrah carefully constructs archival sequences of rare forgotten and long since seen historical material together with Hall’s extensive broadcasts and personal archives, taking the audience on a kaleidoscopic journey through the ideas and personal story of Stuart Hall.
The People’s Uprising in Chile
Taking to the streets by the millions and withstanding brutal police assaults, the working people of Chile have beaten back austerity measures and forced the right-wing Piñera regime to accede to a new constitution to replace the restrictive one imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship.