Marxist Summer Intensive: July 15-17
Through collaborative study and discussion, we aim to provide a challenging learning environment so each participant can develop his/her own theoretical and analytic tools to advance our organizing and movement building work in order to broaden opposition to capital locally, nationally and internationally.
Day 2, Session 2: Looking at Class Consciousness, Class Struggle and Self-Organizing Using Image Theater
"I believe that all the truly revolutionary theatrical groups should transfer to the people the means of production in the theater so that the people themselves may utilize them. The theater is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it. —Augusto Boal
Day 2, Session 3: Public Banking
This session will explore the concept of public banking as an organizing and programmatic strategy for fighting the power of the private banksters and for raising the fundamental question of who should control public monies and decide how they are invested.
Day 2, Session 4—Southern Insurgency: Mass Movements Throughout the Global South
It is essential that we considers the broader historical forces in play today throughout the Global South, such as the effects of imperialism, the decline of the international union movement, class struggle, and the growing reserve army of available labor on a global scale.
Day 3, Session 1: Slackers, Sabotage, and Syndicalism
The term "slacker” originated during WWI and disparaged those (primarily Irish) coded “lazy," “vagrant," and resistant to a proper Protestant work ethic; it also referred to those who would not fight on the side of the Americans (and of course, the British) during WWI.
Day 3, Session 2—Beyond Bernie: The Crisis of Labor & The Left in the United States
What are the prospects and possibilities for independent working class politics in the wake of the Sanders campaign?
Day 3, Session 3: Prometheus in Ruins? Uses and Abuses of the Hero Who Stole Fire
This talk will trace the history of Promethean ideology, beginning with the Godwin/Malthus debates of the 1790s, through its current revival within certain precincts of the left, particularly as it intersects with the ecological crisis and Anthropocene theory today.
Day 3, Session 4—Logistics, Capitalist Circulation, Chokepoints with Charmaine Chua
Can we understand the highway takeover, the port blockade, and the storefront die-in as connected instances of disruption, revealing an arena of struggle that capital’s turn to accumulation through logistical circulation has made available? What do they teach us about the possibilities of disrupting capital’s circuits as a whole? In short, why occupy chokepoints, and why now?
Day 3, Session 5—Devils & Dust: Resisting War in New York, the Pacific, & the Middle East
As capital powers vie for access to ocean routes for trade and military surveillance, peoples of the numerous sectors of the Pacific and Indian Oceans are joining in resistance against the rush to warfare and continuation of war throughout the Middle East.
Day 4, Session 1—It’s Not Over: Lessons for Socialists with Pete Dolack
That the results of uprisings as diverse as the October Revolution, the Prague Spring and the Sandinista Revolution did not meet the revolutionaries’ expectations is a tragedy that requires explanation, but does not require us to deem those revolutionaries as failures.
Day 4, Session 2—Labor in the Global Digital Economy: Ursula Huws
This presentation will tie together disparate economic, cultural, and political phenomena of our last few decades to form a provocative narrative about the shape of the global capitalist economy at present. Ursula will examine the way that advanced information and communications technology has opened up new fields of capital accumulation...
Day 4, Session 3—Sexuality, Gender and Globalization
What role do sex and desire — some of the most intimate aspects of our lives — play in the emergence and evolution of capitalism, and how are they in turn shaped by capital?
Day 4, Session 4—Approaching Science from the Left
This panel aims to open a conversation among scholars and activists about how scientific knowledge and practice can help point the way forward, as well as about how science is abused in efforts to preserve and extend capitalist power over labor and resources.
Ecology, Justice and Revolution in Pope Francis’s ‘Laudato Si’”
We will undertake a close reading of “Laudato Si” supplemented by selected readings in liberation theology, the movement from the Global South combining Christian principles and Marxist praxis that is a major influence on “Laudato Si.”
Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Foucault’s fervent opposition to the Shah and US imperialism and his astute assessment of Iran as a new type of revolution, neither liberal nor leftist, were marred by a surprisingly uncritical stance toward the upsurge of radical Islamism and an untoward silence on the issues of gender and sexuality.