A Spring Fever of World Literature
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYFour writers (John Berger, China Miéville, Arundathi Roy and Chris Abani) who have provided us with an array of work to counter the despair of late capital during this period when the scales are weighted far more towards barbarity and continual degradation of our biosphere, than towards what should be an equally shared planet by all who inhabit it. Please join us for close readings and discussions of works spanning the last century and much of the globe.
Final Friday Film: Camp de Thiaroye
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesIn Camp de Thiaroye the tirailleurs use the traditional, highly rhetorical, almost theatrical, mode of debate of their various societies, but adapt this ritual form to the only language they have in common: the pidgin which the French insultingly call “petit nègre”, a language which is both a result and a tool of colonial exploitation. Here it is revealed as having a potential for eloquence, allowing it to become a moving medium for the articulation of feelings, needs, grievances and resistance, and thus ultimately for the development of the tirailleurs‘ collective political awareness and consciousness of themselves as Africans.
How America Became Capitalist
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesHas America always been capitalist? Today, the US sees itself as the heartland of the international capitalist system, its society and politics intertwined deeply with its economic system. Parisot’s book looks at the history of North America from the founding of the colonies to debunk the myth that America is ‘naturally’ capitalist.
Final Friday Film: Happy-Go-Lucky
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesWhen Poppy takes driving lessons for the first time, her positive attitude contrasts starkly with her gloomy, intolerant and cynical driving instructor, Scott. He is emotionally repressed, has anger problems and becomes extremely agitated by Poppy's casual attitude towards driving. As Poppy gets to know him, it becomes evident that Scott believes in conspiracy theories. His beliefs are partly attributable to his racist and misogynistic views, which make it hard for him to get along with others. Scott seems to be angered by Poppy's sunny personality and what he perceives as a lack of responsibility and concern for driving safety.
Capital, Volume 2
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesHow 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.
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
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThis 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
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThis 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.