Punk Crisis
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesRay Patton argues that punk eroded the boundaries and political categories that defined the Cold War Era, replacing them with a new framework based on identity as conservative or progressive. Through this paradigm shift, punk unwittingly ushered in a new era of global neoliberalism.
Pontecorvo Double Feature!
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesNine years ago the anti-bourgeois film festival began at the Brecht Forum to get to nights like this, where films as profound as The Battle of Algiers and Burn! could be viewed and then discussed, not merely consumed.
Can the Working Class Change the World?
Marx argued, because capitalism is the apotheosis of class society, it must be the last class society: it must, therefore, be destroyed. And only the working class, said Marx, is capable of doing that.
Premonitions
New Perspectives Theatre 456-458 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesThompson combines scholarship and grassroots grit to disabuse us of cherished certainties. Whether uncovering the unrealized promise buried in mainstream cultural offerings or tracing our course toward the moment of reckoning ahead, the essays in Premonitions are both practical investigations and provocations.
Capitalism Discussion with Nancy Fraser
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United States... multidimensional critique of capitalism puts our present conjuncture into broader perspective, enabling diagnoses of the recent resurgence of right-wing populism and suggesting what is required of a viable Left alternative.
Capitalism: Causes, Conditions, Consequences … and Beyond
Join us for a close reading of Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory which shows how different historical regimes of capitalism have relied on institutional separations between economy and polity, production and social reproduction, and human and non-human nature. Interaction between these domains is periodically readjusted in response to crises and upheavals.
Celebrate the Limerick Soviet of 1919
The seismic tremors that the October Revolution sent through Germany, Hungary and Italy are well known to students of the post-World War One Europe. Less familiar is the fact that the revolution’s ripple effects were felt as far to the west as Ireland. This April will mark the centennial of an episode in Irish revolutionary history known at the time—and since—as the Limerick Soviet.
Noam Chomsky’s Yugoslavia: Peace, War, and Dissolution
New Perspectives Theatre 456-458 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesNoam Chomsky’s articles, public talks, and correspondence have provided a critical voice on political and social issues crucial not only to the region but the entire international community, including "humanitarian intervention," the relevance of international law in today’s politics, media manipulations, and economic crisis as a means of political control.
The Working Class Goes to Heaven
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesThis March the New York City left has the opportunity to come together and meet to watch and then discuss this film written, then filmed, edited and released as a film during the period of widespread working class militant activity throughout Italy—1971 still very warm following the Hot Autumn period of 1979. Petri and Volante step up and raise the stakes beyond their earlier collaboration, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.
Globalization and Writing
Unwilling, or unable to conform and accept lesser positions in their societies, they remain within their marginality and write their unease in novels which give readers an alternative report of the results of colonization both abroad where the EuroAmerican capitalists have colonized and what consequences that colonization has made for life in the their countries of origin.
Early American Resistance to Hamilton’s Capitalist Policies
The concentration of economic power was built into the Constitution and enhanced by Hamilton who imposed different forms of British capitalism upon the former colonies that had just rebelled against those policies.
Capital, Volume 1
Karl Marx’s Capital remains the fundamental text for understanding how capitalism works. By unraveling the commoditized forms of our interactions with nature and each other, it provides tools to understand capitalism’s astounding innovativeness and productivity, intertwined with growing inequality and misery, alienation, stunting of human potential, and ecological destruction all over the globe.
Victor Serge’s Notebooks: 1936-1947
Unnameable Books 600 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, NYSerge’s Notebooks were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their entirety in English. They are a a message in a bottle from one of the great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.
Planet of Exile with Rob Wallace
...capital aims at projecting both nature and people off Earth proper into a distinct space where alienated nature and alienated people interact on commoditization’s terms alone. Livestock and crops, and the farmers who tend them, have been beamed up into this new social metabolism.
Tout Va Bien: Screening with Discussion
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United States“Tout Va Bien insists on class struggle throughout but is mainly about radicalizing its stars. Their role in the factory is to look and learn. Indeed, Godard and Gorin upped the class-resentment ante by having the striking workers played not by real workers but by unemployed actors.” —J. Hoberman, for Criterion, Tout Va Bien Revisited