Reinventing the Welfare State: Book + talk special
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWith positivity and rigor, Ursula Huws will outline a ‘digital welfare state’ for the 21st century, which would involve a repurposing of online platform technologies under public control to modernise and expand public services, and improve accessibility.
Start Early, Stay Late: Planning for Care in Old Age
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsCovid-19 has exposed too many weaknesses in the neoliberal capitalist system to count, especially when it comes to the most vulnerable. For 10 years our international, interdisciplinary research team has been documenting the profound weaknesses in nursing home care within Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the US. The lines between for-profit and not have become increasingly blurred by various neoliberal strategies. One of these involves non-profit and state-owned homes contracting out services to for-profit firms as – in denial of the literature on the determinants of health – services such as food, housekeeping, and laundry have been defined out of care and dismissed as ancillary. This contracting out has not only undermined teamwork, but has also resulted in poor food, inadequate cleaning, and limited laundry – all of which threaten health.
The Hour of the Furnaces: A film screening with discussion
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe Hour of the Furnaces is a three-part film which analyzes the severe neocolonial situation of 1960s Argentina, radical wings of Peronism, and the role of violence in the national liberation process. Part 1, Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism focuses on the everyday violence of the Argentine, employing a Marxist analysis between quotes from Martí, Fanon, Césaire, Che, Mariátegui, and other revolutionary figures.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, Session 3—Revolutionary Subjects
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis panel explores what it means to act as a revolutionary subject through analysis of Walter Rodney’s ambivalence about Rosa’s criticisms of revolutionary Russia, critical consideration of Rosa’s writings on slave resistance, indispensability for contemporary progressive politics in South Africa, and turn to the other-than-human world to counteract the political violence of incarceration.
Friedrich Engels with Terrell Carver and Kaan Kangal
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsAll three author/editors celebrate the recent 200th birthday of Engels looking at his youthful works, his early relationship with Karl Marx, address controversy surrounding his Dialectics of Nature and give a broad reassessment of the importance of Engels pithing Marxisms, working class movements, science, philosophy and more.
Health Care, Technology, and Socialized Medicine with Pratyush and Pritha Chandra
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsFor the ecological crisis to become a ground to rethink structural transformation, it is not enough to locate it in the wreckage that capitalism accumulates. It must be understood as constitutive to capitalist social relations, having an intimate connection to the robbery of labor. It is in this sense that the particularization of these crises in the form of pathogens and impending diseases becomes crucial. This helps us to understand the ecological rift as central to everyday life and struggle in capitalism, and also to imagine a transformational class politics.
Socialist Register 2021: Life After the Pandemic with Christoph Hermann
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWhile debt is essential in a profit-driven economy, it is pointless in a needs-based economy. When the goal is that everybody receives what she/he needs, there is no need to go into debt. In this presentation Christoph will present some ideas for a needs-based economy.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: The Mass Strike Past and Present
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe speakers in this fourth session reposition Rosa Luxemburg's analysis in the contexts of the United States Civil War, the Arab Spring, and the twenty-first century migrations northward through the American hemisphere.
Socialist Register 2021: Beyond Digital Capitalism (the entire series)
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsBeyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living Continues on April 27 with another final session on May 2 There are tickets for each session for those who are unable to be present for this series. The series tickets provide entrance to the remaining 6 presentations with discussions. “In addressing how far digital technology has become ... Read more
Dual Presentation: Community Restaurants with Benjamin Selwyn / Postcapitalism: Alternatives or Detour?
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsCommunity Restaurants: Decommodifying Food as Socialist Strategy with Benjamin Selwyn The outbreak of Covid-19 has exacerbated many of the system’s worst aspects. In the UK, the birthplace of free wage-labor based capitalist agriculture, the pandemic has exacerbated existing food inequities. The pandemic has stimulated discussions about how to remedy the world’s corporate-dominated food system. The most popular alternative ... Read more
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Reconsidering Primitive Accumulation
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThis session will be devoted to engaging with Rosa’s pivotal reworking of the concept of primitive accumulation, with attention to historical and contemporary South Africa, medieval European race-making and its legacies, and contemporary commodification of women’s reproductive labor.
Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (a close reading group)
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsEmpire's Endgame maps the complex relations between empire, racist culture, political economy, and the practices of a security-oriented state seeking legitimacy in times of unbearable economic uncertainty. While the book's story unfolds in Britain, its lessons and warnings may well apply to the United States and many other crisis-ridden imperialist polities.
The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsWith cutting-edge analyses, this book looks at the many dark facets of the corporation, including automation, surveillance, tech work, workers' struggles, algorithmic challenges, the disruption of local democracy and much more. “The Cost of Free Shipping” shows how Amazon represents a fundamental shift in global capitalism that we should name, interrogate and be primed to resist.
Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg: Unfinished Conversations with Revolutionary Women
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe remaining five sessions of this seminar series explore some of her signal contributions—her argument that imperialism and primitive accumulation are endemic to capitalism; her prescient attention to racist super-exploitation in southern Africa; her insistence that socialism had to be created in and through the widest form of participatory democracy, including the mass strike; her reflections, with attention to the other-than-human world and incarceration, on transformative subjectivities—through putting them in conversation with Global Southern thinkers past and present.
Organizing Insurgency: Workers’ Movements in the Global South
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsLooking at contemporary case studies in India, the Philippines and South Africa, this book affirms the significance of political and economic representation to the struggles of workers against deepening levels of poverty and inequality that oppress the majority of people on the planet. Immanuel Ness shows that workers are eager to mobilize to improve their conditions, and can achieve lasting gains if they have sustenance and support from political organizations.