1968 and After
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYDuring 1968, in France, Italy, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and all over the world, there were immense uprisings against the status quo. This fall, we will study this watershed period (1968-1974) considering the achievements and failures of the Left in the 1960s. How ready was the Left to face the imposition of neoliberalism, one aspect of capital's response to these uprisings?
“A Screaming Comes Across The Sky…”
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYTwo works that demand our attention. “ Unforgiving Years...has now at last been translated into electric English by the indefatigable Richard Greeman...It's a seething, hallucinatory novel...” —Harper's
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first.
Dread Poetry and Freedom
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesWhat is the relationship between poetry and social change?
Standing at the forefront of political poetry since the 1970s, Linton Kwesi Johnson has been fighting neo-fascism, police violence and promoting socialism while putting pen to paper to refute W.H. Auden's claim that 'poetry makes nothing happen'.
Weekend Special Pass: Austin, Gordon, Marx
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United States2 events and a visit to our ongoing Capital Saturday study session in between.
Moving Against the System
The People's Forum 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesAgainst a backdrop of widespread racism in the West, and colonialism and imperialism in the 'Third World', this group of activists, writers and political figures gathered to discuss the history and struggles of people of African descent and the meaning of Black Power.
The Last Dance Meets The Last Repast
New Perspectives Theatre 456-458 West 37th Street, New York, NY, United StatesThe talk will examinethe historico-political relationships between: the psychiatric transformation of madness into mental illness, the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious, the surrealist anti-psychiatric art, and dance-theater’s embodied expression stripped of narrative development. A surreal meal will be the last part of this event.
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?
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYMarx 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
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYJoin 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
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYThe 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.