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
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThis 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
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYTaking 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.
Capital, Volume 2, Third Sessions
Join us as we journey through this movement from the imaginary concrete to the abstract concrete to the real concrete. Come and challenge your way of thinking and understanding the world as it appears to you and begin to identify some of what needs to be overcome and done to bring about a better world. In Volume 2 we further our ability to de-fetishize the machinations that appear on the surface of society and their real relationship to the production of wealth and the circulation of that wealth throughout all the competing capitalist interests and the various branches of capital, and the different strata of the proletariat —prices, wages, interests, rents, dividends, rates of profit, fictitious capital—while revealing the necessity of tendential contradictions that result in episodic crisis of the system leading to periodic booms and busts!
Spectatorship and Embodied Expression
New Perspectives Theatre 456-458 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United States“ritical art is a type of art that sets out to build awareness of the mechanisms of domination to turn the spectator into a conscious agent of world transformation,” writes philosopher Jacques Rancière in Aesthetics and its Discontents (2004). When as dance artists we decide to work critically with and through the body, and at the same time enter the contested field of the history of psychiatric diagnosis, our aim is to initiate spectator’s transformation. The intention is to make him/her into an active observer of the world outside a given theatrical event. For this to occur, the spectator is asked to remain attentive during a relatively short time of a theatrical event.
Foundations of American Bourgeois White Male Supremacy
The James Baldwin School 351 West 18th Street, New York, NYIn The Invention of the White Race Volumes I & II, Theodore W. Allen offers a historical materialist analysis of racial slavery; a system put in place in the decades following the second phase of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 when an army of European and African chattel bond laborers burnt Jamestown to the ground and temporarily drove Governor Berkeley into exile across the Chesapeake Bay. In a conscious response to labor solidarity the plantation bourgeoisie enacted a series of laws and practices in the late 17th and early 18th century which first put in place the system of white racial privileges which enabled the imposition of racial slavery and “white” male supremacy.
Bertolucci’s 1900
The thick-layered chronicle doesn't sweep across time so much as it escorts the audience through indelible composite events that bristle with personal, social, and political characteristics….Since 1900 has come to stand as an organic cinematic journey through chapters of a rich apocryphal history that evinces an ongoing struggle between the world's rich elite and everyone else.”—Cole Smithey
Capital: A Review of Volumes 1 and 2
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesIn review of Volumes One and Two of Capital and in preparation for our study of Volume 3 we will have a 4 week intersession reading from Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho’s Karl Marx’s Capital. These sessions are suggested as a good review for those who would like to join in for the coming sessions of our close reading of Volume 3 which will begin on January 18. Of course, anyone interested in a review of Capital and/or would simply like to read and discuss the Fine and Saad-Filho book are encouraged to attend as well.
Crises and Uprisings in Latin America Today
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYJoin us for a closer look at the political and economic background to dramatic recent events in Latin America, where a tremendous struggle is taking place between popular movements opposed to neoliberalism and authoritarianism, and capitalist elites determined to defend their profits and privileges.
Antiquity Now: 3 Robert Graves Novels
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYTo bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.
Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours…
—To Bring the Dead to Life, Robert Graves
Any 2 Classes (Winter 2020 Discount)
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYBeginning this January through April of 2020 any two classes may be attended for a reduced price. For example, one may attend “Unearthing the Grundrisse” on Monday and “Capital Volume 3” on Saturday for a combined reduced price according to the level of sliding scale you wish to contribute.
Hispaniola in Revolt
New Perspectives Theatre 456-458 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United Stateshe panel will look at the current Haitian political crisis and popular revolt; the Haitian revolution, its emancipatory legacy of liberation and contradictions; the lessons of the 1946 and 1986 revolts in Haiti; race and class in Santo Domingo; the 1965 Dominican revolution as well as prospects for cross-border and international solidarity and revolution on the island and beyond.
Film and Discussion: State of Siege
State of Siege details the overt and covert practices of the Agency for International Development throughout the world, with a particular emphasis on events that took place in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1970.