BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Marxist Education Project - ECPv6.15.18//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Marxist Education Project
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://marxedproject.org
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Marxist Education Project
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/Halifax
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0300
TZNAME:ADT
DTSTART:20180311T060000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0300
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:AST
DTSTART:20181104T050000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0300
TZNAME:ADT
DTSTART:20190310T060000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0300
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:AST
DTSTART:20191103T050000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0300
TZNAME:ADT
DTSTART:20200308T060000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0300
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:AST
DTSTART:20201101T050000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190202T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190202T140000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006495-1549105200-1549116000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl 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. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-02-02/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190202T153000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190202T173000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181222T164750Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181222T165306Z
UID:10006455-1549121400-1549128600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:The Last Dance Meets The Last Repast
DESCRIPTION:The Politics of the Unconscious: HYSTERIA\, SURREALISM\, & AVANT-GARDE DANCE\nOur Guide: Marija Krtolica\nWinter 2019 Version\nPresentation with discussion\nThe talk examines the 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. Hysteria as one of the most theatrical of mental illnesses\, presents a point of departure for a discussion of the ways in which since modernism the artists resisted psychiatric diagnosis based on a reductive reading of symptoms. The talk will place the artistic explorations from modernism and post-modernism in a dialogue with the ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis. \nPerformance: Theorizing Symptomatic Expression\nGroup movement improvisation:  Hystero-Grotesque Mode\nIntermission \nA surreal meal à la Dalí will be served \nTheorizing Symptomatic Expression \n“The jaws of my mind are in perpetual motion.\nThe sensual intelligence housed in the tabernacle of my palate\nbeckons me to pay greatest attention to food.\nI only like to eat what has a clear and intelligible form.”\n—Salvador Dali\, Gastro Esthetics \n“The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which\nthe commodity completes the colonization of social life.”\n—Guy Debord\, Society of the Spectacle \nMARIJA KRTOLICA (b. 1973\, Belgrade) is an international movement artist\, dance researcher and teacher (BFA NYU\, MFA UC Davis\, MA NYU\, PhD\, Dance\,Temple University). Her current research focuses on the meanings and symptoms of hysteria in the nineteenth century\, and critical re-investigation of hysterical scenes in Tanztheater. At the artistic residence in Spread Art in Detroit\, the University of Arts\, Belgrade\, and at the Le Couvent artistic residence in Auzits\, France.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/the-last-dance-meets-the-last-repast/
LOCATION:New Perspectives Theatre\, 456-458 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/HysterDanceBrunchSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190204T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190204T210000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006479-1549306800-1549314000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-02-04/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190207T173000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190207T191500
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190112T034008Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190112T034008Z
UID:10006506-1549560600-1549566900@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Can the Working Class Change the World?
DESCRIPTION:5 Sessions \nCan the Working Class Change the World?\nBy Michael D. Yates\nA new book from Monthly Review Press \nSession 1\nThursday\, February 7\, 5:30 to 7:15\nA discussion with author Michael D. Yates\nSessions 2-5\nMondays\, February 11 through March 4\nAnalysis and discussion of the book\nThe first 10 registered participants in this group will receive a free copy of the book. Contributions to Monthly Review Press are appreciated.\nFrom Monthly Review: \nOne of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor\, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself\, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But\, as Karl Marx pointed out\, it is the fact of being paid for one’s work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce”—where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday\, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals”—lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They’ve organized unions\, struck\, picketed\, boycotted\, formed political organizations and parties—sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But\, 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. \nIn his timely and innovative book\, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can\, indeed\, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work\, itself\, Yates wonders if there can\, in fact\, be a thing called the working class. If so\, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender\, race\, ethnicity\, religion\, location—to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions\, Yates supports his arguments with relevant\, clearly explained data\, historical examples\, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class\, and what all of us might do to change the world. \n“Michael Yates’s passion and respect for the class he came out of delivers a book that is especially accessible without retreating from the complexities and internal contradictions of working class life and organization—a book committed not only to defending workers\, but also to building on their potentials to transform society.”      —Sam Gindin\, former chief economist\, Canadian Auto Workers Union; Packer Visitor in Social Justice\, Political Science\, York University\, Toronto \nOn Thursday\, February 7\, Michael Yates will teleconference with us for a preview and discussion of his important new book. On the four Mondays that follow\, we will read\, analyze and Michael’s book. \nMichael D. Yates is Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press. For more than three decades\, he was a labor educator\, teaching working people across the United States. Among his books are The Great Inequality\, Why Unions Matter\, A Freedom Budget for All Americans (with Paul Le Blanc)\, and The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (with Fred Magdoff). \nThe Capital Studies Group has been meeting on Saturdays for nearly two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are now dedicating themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. \n  \nThe stated fees are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay.\, or
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/can-the-working-class-change-the-world/2019-02-07/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CanWorkingClassSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190207T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190207T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181218T045246Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181218T160333Z
UID:10006437-1549562400-1549567800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences ... and Beyond
DESCRIPTION:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences … and Beyond\nThe Ecosocialism Group convened with Fred Murphy and Steve Knight \n8 Sessions \nThe Marxist Education Project’s Ecosocialism Study Group — now completing its third year — devotes the winter 2019 term to Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Join us for a close reading of this new work\, 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. Such “boundary struggles” can help us better grasp capitalism’s contradictions and elaborate strategies for moving beyond it. Supplementary readings will be drawn from related work by David Harvey\, Silvia Federici\, and others. \n  \nFRED MURPHY and STEVE KNIGHT have co-led the Ecosocialism Study Group since 2016. Both are active in DSA’s climate justice work. Fred studied and taught historical sociology at The New School for Social Research. Steve reviews books for Marx & Philosophy and is active in faith-centered environmental groups.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-causes-conditions-consequences-and-beyond/2019-02-07/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalismConversationSite-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190207T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190207T213000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181216T071121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T043627Z
UID:10006410-1549567800-1549575000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Globalization and Writing
DESCRIPTION:Exploration: Exploitation/Domination • Discovery/Liberation\n4 Works • 11 Weeks \nThe MEP Literature Group \nIn this eleven-week session we will read one memoir and three novels that study the scope of empire. Written between 1899 and 2000\, the authors\, two sailors (Polish and American)\, a Jamaican social theorist\, and a British Jamaican immigrant are denied privilege because of their citizenship (or lack of it)\, class\, or color. 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 home countries. \nHeart of Darkness\nJoseph Conrad\nThe story\, written at the height of the British Empire\, reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890 when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The experience left him disillusioned\, questioning what it meant to be civilized in the age of colonialism \nThis novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed\, violence\, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike\, have been widely praised. However\, some postcolonial African writers\, most notably Chinua Achebe\, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. \nFamiliar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands\nStuart Hall\nFamiliar Stranger takes us only as far as the mid-1960s\, after a decade during which\, for Hall\, “normal” life was suspended in favour of non-stop political agitation. The book touches on his role in the New Left; his critical involvement with CND; his early exposition of the “formal” and “unwitting” variants of British racism; and the importance of Catherine\, with whom he relocated to Birmingham at the start of his lifelong embrace of cultural studies. These recollections of a busy life in Britain nonetheless remain haunted by the ghostly presence of his earlier years in Jamaica. With its resonant subtitle\, A Life Between Two Islands\, it encourages the reader to draw such parallels as that between Jamaica’s 1938 rebellion and the Brixton riots of 1981. It was Hall’s belief that the British had never fully come to terms with colonialism and decolonization. \nDog Soldiers\nRobert Stone\nDog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America\, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse\, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe\, waits for artistic inspiration as a correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin\, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. \nWhite Teeth\nZadie Smith\nThis may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless\, globalized\, intermarried\, post-colonial age\, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24\, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners\, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. Archie marries a Jamaican; Samad has twin sons\, one of whom becomes a religious militant\, the other a rabid Anglophile. The overlapping fates of Smith’s characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern\, White Teeth doesn’t quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them. \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has recently completed readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years following by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Our second summer of noir\, considered works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, and novels on border politics\, migrations and labor organizing.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/globalization-and-writing/2019-02-07/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GlobalizedLitJan24_Site2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190209T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190209T140000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006496-1549710000-1549720800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl 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. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-02-09/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190211T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190211T210000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006480-1549911600-1549918800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-02-11/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190211T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190211T210000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190112T034008Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190112T034008Z
UID:10006507-1549911600-1549918800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Can the Working Class Change the World?
DESCRIPTION:5 Sessions \nCan the Working Class Change the World?\nBy Michael D. Yates\nA new book from Monthly Review Press \nSession 1\nThursday\, February 7\, 5:30 to 7:15\nA discussion with author Michael D. Yates\nSessions 2-5\nMondays\, February 11 through March 4\nAnalysis and discussion of the book\nThe first 10 registered participants in this group will receive a free copy of the book. Contributions to Monthly Review Press are appreciated.\nFrom Monthly Review: \nOne of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor\, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself\, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But\, as Karl Marx pointed out\, it is the fact of being paid for one’s work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce”—where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday\, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals”—lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They’ve organized unions\, struck\, picketed\, boycotted\, formed political organizations and parties—sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But\, 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. \nIn his timely and innovative book\, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can\, indeed\, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work\, itself\, Yates wonders if there can\, in fact\, be a thing called the working class. If so\, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender\, race\, ethnicity\, religion\, location—to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions\, Yates supports his arguments with relevant\, clearly explained data\, historical examples\, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class\, and what all of us might do to change the world. \n“Michael Yates’s passion and respect for the class he came out of delivers a book that is especially accessible without retreating from the complexities and internal contradictions of working class life and organization—a book committed not only to defending workers\, but also to building on their potentials to transform society.”      —Sam Gindin\, former chief economist\, Canadian Auto Workers Union; Packer Visitor in Social Justice\, Political Science\, York University\, Toronto \nOn Thursday\, February 7\, Michael Yates will teleconference with us for a preview and discussion of his important new book. On the four Mondays that follow\, we will read\, analyze and Michael’s book. \nMichael D. Yates is Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press. For more than three decades\, he was a labor educator\, teaching working people across the United States. Among his books are The Great Inequality\, Why Unions Matter\, A Freedom Budget for All Americans (with Paul Le Blanc)\, and The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (with Fred Magdoff). \nThe Capital Studies Group has been meeting on Saturdays for nearly two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are now dedicating themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. \n  \nThe stated fees are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay.\, or
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/can-the-working-class-change-the-world/2019-02-11/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CanWorkingClassSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190214T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190214T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181218T045246Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181218T160333Z
UID:10006438-1550167200-1550172600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences ... and Beyond
DESCRIPTION:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences … and Beyond\nThe Ecosocialism Group convened with Fred Murphy and Steve Knight \n8 Sessions \nThe Marxist Education Project’s Ecosocialism Study Group — now completing its third year — devotes the winter 2019 term to Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Join us for a close reading of this new work\, 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. Such “boundary struggles” can help us better grasp capitalism’s contradictions and elaborate strategies for moving beyond it. Supplementary readings will be drawn from related work by David Harvey\, Silvia Federici\, and others. \n  \nFRED MURPHY and STEVE KNIGHT have co-led the Ecosocialism Study Group since 2016. Both are active in DSA’s climate justice work. Fred studied and taught historical sociology at The New School for Social Research. Steve reviews books for Marx & Philosophy and is active in faith-centered environmental groups.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-causes-conditions-consequences-and-beyond/2019-02-14/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalismConversationSite-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190214T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190214T213000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181216T071121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T043627Z
UID:10006411-1550172600-1550179800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Globalization and Writing
DESCRIPTION:Exploration: Exploitation/Domination • Discovery/Liberation\n4 Works • 11 Weeks \nThe MEP Literature Group \nIn this eleven-week session we will read one memoir and three novels that study the scope of empire. Written between 1899 and 2000\, the authors\, two sailors (Polish and American)\, a Jamaican social theorist\, and a British Jamaican immigrant are denied privilege because of their citizenship (or lack of it)\, class\, or color. 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 home countries. \nHeart of Darkness\nJoseph Conrad\nThe story\, written at the height of the British Empire\, reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890 when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The experience left him disillusioned\, questioning what it meant to be civilized in the age of colonialism \nThis novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed\, violence\, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike\, have been widely praised. However\, some postcolonial African writers\, most notably Chinua Achebe\, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. \nFamiliar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands\nStuart Hall\nFamiliar Stranger takes us only as far as the mid-1960s\, after a decade during which\, for Hall\, “normal” life was suspended in favour of non-stop political agitation. The book touches on his role in the New Left; his critical involvement with CND; his early exposition of the “formal” and “unwitting” variants of British racism; and the importance of Catherine\, with whom he relocated to Birmingham at the start of his lifelong embrace of cultural studies. These recollections of a busy life in Britain nonetheless remain haunted by the ghostly presence of his earlier years in Jamaica. With its resonant subtitle\, A Life Between Two Islands\, it encourages the reader to draw such parallels as that between Jamaica’s 1938 rebellion and the Brixton riots of 1981. It was Hall’s belief that the British had never fully come to terms with colonialism and decolonization. \nDog Soldiers\nRobert Stone\nDog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America\, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse\, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe\, waits for artistic inspiration as a correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin\, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. \nWhite Teeth\nZadie Smith\nThis may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless\, globalized\, intermarried\, post-colonial age\, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24\, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners\, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. Archie marries a Jamaican; Samad has twin sons\, one of whom becomes a religious militant\, the other a rabid Anglophile. The overlapping fates of Smith’s characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern\, White Teeth doesn’t quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them. \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has recently completed readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years following by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Our second summer of noir\, considered works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, and novels on border politics\, migrations and labor organizing.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/globalization-and-writing/2019-02-14/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GlobalizedLitJan24_Site2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190216T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190216T140000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006497-1550314800-1550325600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl 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. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-02-16/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190218T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190218T210000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006481-1550516400-1550523600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-02-18/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190218T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190218T210000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190112T034008Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190112T034008Z
UID:10006508-1550516400-1550523600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Can the Working Class Change the World?
DESCRIPTION:5 Sessions \nCan the Working Class Change the World?\nBy Michael D. Yates\nA new book from Monthly Review Press \nSession 1\nThursday\, February 7\, 5:30 to 7:15\nA discussion with author Michael D. Yates\nSessions 2-5\nMondays\, February 11 through March 4\nAnalysis and discussion of the book\nThe first 10 registered participants in this group will receive a free copy of the book. Contributions to Monthly Review Press are appreciated.\nFrom Monthly Review: \nOne of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor\, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself\, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But\, as Karl Marx pointed out\, it is the fact of being paid for one’s work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce”—where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday\, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals”—lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They’ve organized unions\, struck\, picketed\, boycotted\, formed political organizations and parties—sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But\, 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. \nIn his timely and innovative book\, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can\, indeed\, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work\, itself\, Yates wonders if there can\, in fact\, be a thing called the working class. If so\, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender\, race\, ethnicity\, religion\, location—to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions\, Yates supports his arguments with relevant\, clearly explained data\, historical examples\, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class\, and what all of us might do to change the world. \n“Michael Yates’s passion and respect for the class he came out of delivers a book that is especially accessible without retreating from the complexities and internal contradictions of working class life and organization—a book committed not only to defending workers\, but also to building on their potentials to transform society.”      —Sam Gindin\, former chief economist\, Canadian Auto Workers Union; Packer Visitor in Social Justice\, Political Science\, York University\, Toronto \nOn Thursday\, February 7\, Michael Yates will teleconference with us for a preview and discussion of his important new book. On the four Mondays that follow\, we will read\, analyze and Michael’s book. \nMichael D. Yates is Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press. For more than three decades\, he was a labor educator\, teaching working people across the United States. Among his books are The Great Inequality\, Why Unions Matter\, A Freedom Budget for All Americans (with Paul Le Blanc)\, and The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (with Fred Magdoff). \nThe Capital Studies Group has been meeting on Saturdays for nearly two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are now dedicating themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. \n  \nThe stated fees are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay.\, or
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/can-the-working-class-change-the-world/2019-02-18/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CanWorkingClassSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190220T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190220T213000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190108T043707Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190213T152959Z
UID:10006478-1550691000-1550698200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Punk Crisis
DESCRIPTION:The Global Punk Rock Revolution\nwith author Ray Patton\nIn March 1977\, Johnny Rotten Lydon of the Sex Pistols looked over the Berlin wall onto the grey\, militarized landscape of East Berlin. He then went up to the wall and gave it the finger. He didn’t know it at the time\, but the Sex Pistols’ reputation had preceded his gesture\, as young people in the Second World busily appropriated news reports on degenerate Western culture as punk instruction manuals. Soon after\, burgeoning Polish punk impresario Henryk Gajewski brought the London punk band the Raincoats to perform at his art gallery and student club-the epicenter for Warsaw’s nascent punk scene. When the Raincoats returned to England\, they found London erupting at the Rock Against Racism concert\, which brought together 100\,000 First World UK punks and Third World Caribbean immigrants who contributed their cultures of reggae and Rastafarianism. Punk had formed networks reaching across all three of the Cold War’s worlds. \nThe first global narrative of punk\, Punk Crisis examines how transnational punk movements challenged the global order of the Cold War\, blurring the boundaries between East and West\, North and South\, communism and capitalism through performances of creative dissent. Raymond Patton studies the relationship between popular culture\, aesthetics\, identity\, and politics in the modern world\, with an emphasis on reexamining the relationship between the “first\,” “second\,” and “third” worlds of the Cold War era. As a History professor\, he has taught on a wide range of subject matter\, including World History\, Fascism and Nazi Germany\, East European and Soviet history\, Music and Resistance\, The Meaning of Life\, and Global Foundations: Consumerism. He has also played sax in a 3rd wave ska punk band. He currently serves as Director of Educational Partnerships and General Education at John Jay College\, CUNY.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/punk-crisis/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/PunkCrisisSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190221T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190221T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181218T045246Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181218T160333Z
UID:10006439-1550772000-1550777400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences ... and Beyond
DESCRIPTION:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences … and Beyond\nThe Ecosocialism Group convened with Fred Murphy and Steve Knight \n8 Sessions \nThe Marxist Education Project’s Ecosocialism Study Group — now completing its third year — devotes the winter 2019 term to Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Join us for a close reading of this new work\, 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. Such “boundary struggles” can help us better grasp capitalism’s contradictions and elaborate strategies for moving beyond it. Supplementary readings will be drawn from related work by David Harvey\, Silvia Federici\, and others. \n  \nFRED MURPHY and STEVE KNIGHT have co-led the Ecosocialism Study Group since 2016. Both are active in DSA’s climate justice work. Fred studied and taught historical sociology at The New School for Social Research. Steve reviews books for Marx & Philosophy and is active in faith-centered environmental groups.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-causes-conditions-consequences-and-beyond/2019-02-21/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalismConversationSite-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190221T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190221T213000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181216T071121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T043627Z
UID:10006412-1550777400-1550784600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Globalization and Writing
DESCRIPTION:Exploration: Exploitation/Domination • Discovery/Liberation\n4 Works • 11 Weeks \nThe MEP Literature Group \nIn this eleven-week session we will read one memoir and three novels that study the scope of empire. Written between 1899 and 2000\, the authors\, two sailors (Polish and American)\, a Jamaican social theorist\, and a British Jamaican immigrant are denied privilege because of their citizenship (or lack of it)\, class\, or color. 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 home countries. \nHeart of Darkness\nJoseph Conrad\nThe story\, written at the height of the British Empire\, reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890 when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The experience left him disillusioned\, questioning what it meant to be civilized in the age of colonialism \nThis novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed\, violence\, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike\, have been widely praised. However\, some postcolonial African writers\, most notably Chinua Achebe\, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. \nFamiliar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands\nStuart Hall\nFamiliar Stranger takes us only as far as the mid-1960s\, after a decade during which\, for Hall\, “normal” life was suspended in favour of non-stop political agitation. The book touches on his role in the New Left; his critical involvement with CND; his early exposition of the “formal” and “unwitting” variants of British racism; and the importance of Catherine\, with whom he relocated to Birmingham at the start of his lifelong embrace of cultural studies. These recollections of a busy life in Britain nonetheless remain haunted by the ghostly presence of his earlier years in Jamaica. With its resonant subtitle\, A Life Between Two Islands\, it encourages the reader to draw such parallels as that between Jamaica’s 1938 rebellion and the Brixton riots of 1981. It was Hall’s belief that the British had never fully come to terms with colonialism and decolonization. \nDog Soldiers\nRobert Stone\nDog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America\, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse\, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe\, waits for artistic inspiration as a correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin\, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. \nWhite Teeth\nZadie Smith\nThis may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless\, globalized\, intermarried\, post-colonial age\, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24\, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners\, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. Archie marries a Jamaican; Samad has twin sons\, one of whom becomes a religious militant\, the other a rabid Anglophile. The overlapping fates of Smith’s characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern\, White Teeth doesn’t quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them. \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has recently completed readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years following by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Our second summer of noir\, considered works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, and novels on border politics\, migrations and labor organizing.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/globalization-and-writing/2019-02-21/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GlobalizedLitJan24_Site2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190222T173000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190222T220000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190203T054602Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190203T054602Z
UID:10006516-1550856600-1550872800@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Pontecorvo Double Feature!
DESCRIPTION:Anti-Bourgeois Film Festival\n9th Anniversary Double Feature \nPontecorvo Night @ The People’s Forum \nPresented by The Left Academy & The Marxist Education Project \n5:30 pm\nThe Battle of Algiers\n1965\, 100 minutes\nThe celebrated\, newsreel-like film\, shot in Algiers in black and white details the national war for independence as fought in Algiers against the occupying French forces. Director Gillo Pontecorvo and writer Franco Solinas created several protagonists in their screenplay\, who are based on historical war figures. The story begins and ends from the perspective of Ali la Pointe (Brahim Haggiag)\, a petty criminal who is politically radicalized while in prison. He is recruited by FLN commander El-hadi Jafar. This character is played by Saadi Yacef\, who was a veteran FLN commander. \n7:45 pm\nPresentation and discussion of significance of Pontecorvo’s two great films during his time and ours \n8:30 pm\nQuemada (Burn!)\n1969\, 108 minutes\n \nA film of revolt set in the Caribbean\, could be any of the colonized islands. Marlon Brando plays a British agent who advises Jose Dolores as leader of a slave revolt\, to advance English colonial interests. In 1848\, revolutionary Jose Dolores\, disgusted by the white government’s collaboration with British interests–leads a second uprising\, jeopardizing the Antilles Royal Sugar Company. After six years of the uprising\, in 1854\, the company brings Walker (the Brando character) back to Queimada with the consent of the British Admiralty\, tasking him with suppressing the revolt and pacifying the island. Walker attempts to save Dolores’s life but the rebel leader rejects his assistance\, asserting that freedom is earned\, not received. \nSoundtracks to both films by Ennio Morricone \nFrom an interview with Gillo Pontecorvo by Maria Esposito for the World Socialist Web Site\nJune\, 2004 \n“…About three years ago the BBC defined my work as “the dictatorship of truth”. In my cinema\, when faced with the choice of distancing oneself from reality or using an effect that might be used to win the popularity with the public\, I always renounce these possibilities and stay close to reality. \nME: Is this why you decided to make The Battle of Algiers in documentary style? \nGP: Yes. \nLet me explain how much this love for reality\, the reality that surrounds us\, weighed on me. I only spent four days doing the screen tests for the actors in The Battle of Algiers\, but a month looking for the right kind of photography that would best convey this sense of truth. \nThe difficulty was to find the right sort of look that would imitate grainy photography with strong contrasts\, like those of the newsreels\, and yet\, because it had to be shown in the cinemas where people paid to see it\, it had to retain a certain formal dignity\, a formal beauty. It therefore took us a month to discover the technique required. The method that finally guided us was to take the original negative and make a copy of it and then re-photograph the copy.” \nFrom a 1999 Gerald Peary interview with Pontecorvo \nCineaste: Could you talk about your brilliant casting in Burn!\, using a non-actor as the West Indian guerilla leader\, Jose Dolores\, opposite Marlon Brando. \nPontecorvo: It was a fight! United Artists wanted me to use Sidney Poitier. I didn’t want to\, though I like him as an actor\, because his face wasn’t wild. Then I went looking to off-Broadway for black actors. I didn’t find the right one. \nIn Colombia\, during a location scout\, we were searching for a forest to burn. We drove very far into the wild in a jeep. Suddenly we saw this peasant man on a horse. This is the face I’d been looking for for four months. But instead of coming to me\, he ran away! It was very hot\, people around me were furious when I said\, “Sorry\, we have to find this man.” We asked the local chief to order the playing of a drum. All the people came out\, including this man\, Evaristo Marquez. He’d never seen a movie but he understood money. He said\, “OK.” \nI called Marlon on his island. He said\, “If you believe he’s right\, don’t worry about me.”
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/pontecorvo-double-feature/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/BofASite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190223T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190223T140000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006498-1550919600-1550930400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl 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. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-02-23/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190225T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190225T210000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006482-1551121200-1551128400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-02-25/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190225T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190225T210000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190112T034008Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190112T034008Z
UID:10006509-1551121200-1551128400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Can the Working Class Change the World?
DESCRIPTION:5 Sessions \nCan the Working Class Change the World?\nBy Michael D. Yates\nA new book from Monthly Review Press \nSession 1\nThursday\, February 7\, 5:30 to 7:15\nA discussion with author Michael D. Yates\nSessions 2-5\nMondays\, February 11 through March 4\nAnalysis and discussion of the book\nThe first 10 registered participants in this group will receive a free copy of the book. Contributions to Monthly Review Press are appreciated.\nFrom Monthly Review: \nOne of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor\, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself\, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But\, as Karl Marx pointed out\, it is the fact of being paid for one’s work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce”—where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday\, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals”—lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They’ve organized unions\, struck\, picketed\, boycotted\, formed political organizations and parties—sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But\, 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. \nIn his timely and innovative book\, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can\, indeed\, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work\, itself\, Yates wonders if there can\, in fact\, be a thing called the working class. If so\, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender\, race\, ethnicity\, religion\, location—to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions\, Yates supports his arguments with relevant\, clearly explained data\, historical examples\, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class\, and what all of us might do to change the world. \n“Michael Yates’s passion and respect for the class he came out of delivers a book that is especially accessible without retreating from the complexities and internal contradictions of working class life and organization—a book committed not only to defending workers\, but also to building on their potentials to transform society.”      —Sam Gindin\, former chief economist\, Canadian Auto Workers Union; Packer Visitor in Social Justice\, Political Science\, York University\, Toronto \nOn Thursday\, February 7\, Michael Yates will teleconference with us for a preview and discussion of his important new book. On the four Mondays that follow\, we will read\, analyze and Michael’s book. \nMichael D. Yates is Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press. For more than three decades\, he was a labor educator\, teaching working people across the United States. Among his books are The Great Inequality\, Why Unions Matter\, A Freedom Budget for All Americans (with Paul Le Blanc)\, and The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (with Fred Magdoff). \nThe Capital Studies Group has been meeting on Saturdays for nearly two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are now dedicating themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. \n  \nThe stated fees are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay.\, or
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/can-the-working-class-change-the-world/2019-02-25/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CanWorkingClassSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190228T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190228T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181218T045246Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181218T160333Z
UID:10006440-1551376800-1551382200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences ... and Beyond
DESCRIPTION:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences … and Beyond\nThe Ecosocialism Group convened with Fred Murphy and Steve Knight \n8 Sessions \nThe Marxist Education Project’s Ecosocialism Study Group — now completing its third year — devotes the winter 2019 term to Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Join us for a close reading of this new work\, 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. Such “boundary struggles” can help us better grasp capitalism’s contradictions and elaborate strategies for moving beyond it. Supplementary readings will be drawn from related work by David Harvey\, Silvia Federici\, and others. \n  \nFRED MURPHY and STEVE KNIGHT have co-led the Ecosocialism Study Group since 2016. Both are active in DSA’s climate justice work. Fred studied and taught historical sociology at The New School for Social Research. Steve reviews books for Marx & Philosophy and is active in faith-centered environmental groups.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-causes-conditions-consequences-and-beyond/2019-02-28/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalismConversationSite-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190228T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190228T213000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181216T071121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T043627Z
UID:10006413-1551382200-1551389400@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Globalization and Writing
DESCRIPTION:Exploration: Exploitation/Domination • Discovery/Liberation\n4 Works • 11 Weeks \nThe MEP Literature Group \nIn this eleven-week session we will read one memoir and three novels that study the scope of empire. Written between 1899 and 2000\, the authors\, two sailors (Polish and American)\, a Jamaican social theorist\, and a British Jamaican immigrant are denied privilege because of their citizenship (or lack of it)\, class\, or color. 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 home countries. \nHeart of Darkness\nJoseph Conrad\nThe story\, written at the height of the British Empire\, reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890 when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The experience left him disillusioned\, questioning what it meant to be civilized in the age of colonialism \nThis novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed\, violence\, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike\, have been widely praised. However\, some postcolonial African writers\, most notably Chinua Achebe\, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. \nFamiliar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands\nStuart Hall\nFamiliar Stranger takes us only as far as the mid-1960s\, after a decade during which\, for Hall\, “normal” life was suspended in favour of non-stop political agitation. The book touches on his role in the New Left; his critical involvement with CND; his early exposition of the “formal” and “unwitting” variants of British racism; and the importance of Catherine\, with whom he relocated to Birmingham at the start of his lifelong embrace of cultural studies. These recollections of a busy life in Britain nonetheless remain haunted by the ghostly presence of his earlier years in Jamaica. With its resonant subtitle\, A Life Between Two Islands\, it encourages the reader to draw such parallels as that between Jamaica’s 1938 rebellion and the Brixton riots of 1981. It was Hall’s belief that the British had never fully come to terms with colonialism and decolonization. \nDog Soldiers\nRobert Stone\nDog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America\, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse\, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe\, waits for artistic inspiration as a correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin\, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. \nWhite Teeth\nZadie Smith\nThis may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless\, globalized\, intermarried\, post-colonial age\, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24\, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners\, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. Archie marries a Jamaican; Samad has twin sons\, one of whom becomes a religious militant\, the other a rabid Anglophile. The overlapping fates of Smith’s characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern\, White Teeth doesn’t quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them. \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has recently completed readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years following by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Our second summer of noir\, considered works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, and novels on border politics\, migrations and labor organizing.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/globalization-and-writing/2019-02-28/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GlobalizedLitJan24_Site2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190302T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190302T140000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006499-1551524400-1551535200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl 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. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-03-02/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190304T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190304T210000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190109T164958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140844Z
UID:10006483-1551726000-1551733200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Black Reconstruction
DESCRIPTION:Black Reconstruction: An American Revolutionary Period\nwith the Revolutions Study Group \n13-week session \nSome have called the U.S. Civil War the “second American revolution” or the completion of the first American revolution. Others claim that the war of independence and Civil War were not revolutions\, but had tremendous revolutionary potential. By whichever historical claim\, the great social revolution of that momentous period following the Civil War was surely the “reconstruction” of social relations in the former slave states. In his groundbreaking study (1935)\, W.E.B. DuBois reveals that this social revolution was both initiated by slaves in the midst of the war and carried through by the emancipated Black population during and after the period when federal troops occupied the former Confederate states. DuBois is concerned to refute the multiple slanders imputed to “Reconstruction” during the counter-revolutionary “Jim Crow” period that followed and to record the real advancements of democracy and social reform made under Reconstruction and partly lost when it was defeated. We will read DuBois’ Black Reconstruction (Oxford University Press\, 2007) in whole\, and for more recent research\, the middle part of Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press\, 2003). Both books are readily available new and used\, as e-books\, and in libraries. Email to info@marxedproject.org for a reading syllabus. \n \nTHE REVOLUTIONS STUDY GROUP (originally at the Brecht Forum) has been meeting for 10 years. Individual participants have come and gone\, however the group has held together\, studying in depth a wide range of history including the French Revolution\, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917\, the Mau-Mau Revolt in Kenya\, the Haitian Revolution\, the European Revolutions of 1848\, the May movement in France of 1968 and the Hot Autumn of Italy the following year\, the Spanish Civil War\, the Mexican Revolution\, the Socialist (2nd) International\, the German revolutionary period of 1918-1924\, and the Chinese revolutionary process of the 20th Century. \nThe listed fees are sliding scale. No one is denied admission for inability to pay. \n  \nTONIGHT\, FEBRUARY 11 ONLY: The class will meet at The Brooklyn Commons\, 388 Atlantic Avenue. A or G trains to Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop is a short walk from this venue.\n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/black-reconstruction/2019-03-04/
LOCATION:The People’s Forum\, 320 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ReconstructionSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190304T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190304T210000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190112T034008Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190112T034008Z
UID:10006510-1551726000-1551733200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Can the Working Class Change the World?
DESCRIPTION:5 Sessions \nCan the Working Class Change the World?\nBy Michael D. Yates\nA new book from Monthly Review Press \nSession 1\nThursday\, February 7\, 5:30 to 7:15\nA discussion with author Michael D. Yates\nSessions 2-5\nMondays\, February 11 through March 4\nAnalysis and discussion of the book\nThe first 10 registered participants in this group will receive a free copy of the book. Contributions to Monthly Review Press are appreciated.\nFrom Monthly Review: \nOne of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor\, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself\, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But\, as Karl Marx pointed out\, it is the fact of being paid for one’s work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce”—where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday\, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals”—lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They’ve organized unions\, struck\, picketed\, boycotted\, formed political organizations and parties—sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. But\, 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. \nIn his timely and innovative book\, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can\, indeed\, change the world. Deftly factoring in such contemporary elements as sharp changes in the rise of identity politics and the nature of work\, itself\, Yates wonders if there can\, in fact\, be a thing called the working class. If so\, how might it overcome inherent divisions of gender\, race\, ethnicity\, religion\, location—to become a cohesive and radical force for change? Forcefully and without illusions\, Yates supports his arguments with relevant\, clearly explained data\, historical examples\, and his own personal experiences. This book is a sophisticated and prescient understanding of the working class\, and what all of us might do to change the world. \n“Michael Yates’s passion and respect for the class he came out of delivers a book that is especially accessible without retreating from the complexities and internal contradictions of working class life and organization—a book committed not only to defending workers\, but also to building on their potentials to transform society.”      —Sam Gindin\, former chief economist\, Canadian Auto Workers Union; Packer Visitor in Social Justice\, Political Science\, York University\, Toronto \nOn Thursday\, February 7\, Michael Yates will teleconference with us for a preview and discussion of his important new book. On the four Mondays that follow\, we will read\, analyze and Michael’s book. \nMichael D. Yates is Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press. For more than three decades\, he was a labor educator\, teaching working people across the United States. Among his books are The Great Inequality\, Why Unions Matter\, A Freedom Budget for All Americans (with Paul Le Blanc)\, and The ABCs of the Economic Crisis (with Fred Magdoff). \nThe Capital Studies Group has been meeting on Saturdays for nearly two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are now dedicating themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. \n  \nThe stated fees are sliding scale. No one is turned away for inability to pay.\, or
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/can-the-working-class-change-the-world/2019-03-04/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CanWorkingClassSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190307T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190307T193000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181218T045246Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181218T160333Z
UID:10006441-1551981600-1551987000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences ... and Beyond
DESCRIPTION:Capitalism: Causes\, Conditions\, Consequences … and Beyond\nThe Ecosocialism Group convened with Fred Murphy and Steve Knight \n8 Sessions \nThe Marxist Education Project’s Ecosocialism Study Group — now completing its third year — devotes the winter 2019 term to Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi’s Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Join us for a close reading of this new work\, 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. Such “boundary struggles” can help us better grasp capitalism’s contradictions and elaborate strategies for moving beyond it. Supplementary readings will be drawn from related work by David Harvey\, Silvia Federici\, and others. \n  \nFRED MURPHY and STEVE KNIGHT have co-led the Ecosocialism Study Group since 2016. Both are active in DSA’s climate justice work. Fred studied and taught historical sociology at The New School for Social Research. Steve reviews books for Marx & Philosophy and is active in faith-centered environmental groups.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capitalism-causes-conditions-consequences-and-beyond/2019-03-07/
LOCATION:United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalismConversationSite-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190307T193000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190307T213000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20181216T071121Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190320T043627Z
UID:10006414-1551987000-1551994200@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Globalization and Writing
DESCRIPTION:Exploration: Exploitation/Domination • Discovery/Liberation\n4 Works • 11 Weeks \nThe MEP Literature Group \nIn this eleven-week session we will read one memoir and three novels that study the scope of empire. Written between 1899 and 2000\, the authors\, two sailors (Polish and American)\, a Jamaican social theorist\, and a British Jamaican immigrant are denied privilege because of their citizenship (or lack of it)\, class\, or color. 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 home countries. \nHeart of Darkness\nJoseph Conrad\nThe story\, written at the height of the British Empire\, reflects the physical and psychological shock Conrad himself experienced in 1890 when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The experience left him disillusioned\, questioning what it meant to be civilized in the age of colonialism \nThis novella is astonishingly powerful and equally enigmatic. Its condemnation of Western imperialism—of the greed\, violence\, and exploitation that so often accompanies ventures to bring “light” and civilization to the “dark” and needy areas of the world—and its poignant look at the destructive influence of colonization on the colonized and colonizer alike\, have been widely praised. However\, some postcolonial African writers\, most notably Chinua Achebe\, deemed the book racist for its portrayal of native African cultures. \nFamiliar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands\nStuart Hall\nFamiliar Stranger takes us only as far as the mid-1960s\, after a decade during which\, for Hall\, “normal” life was suspended in favour of non-stop political agitation. The book touches on his role in the New Left; his critical involvement with CND; his early exposition of the “formal” and “unwitting” variants of British racism; and the importance of Catherine\, with whom he relocated to Birmingham at the start of his lifelong embrace of cultural studies. These recollections of a busy life in Britain nonetheless remain haunted by the ghostly presence of his earlier years in Jamaica. With its resonant subtitle\, A Life Between Two Islands\, it encourages the reader to draw such parallels as that between Jamaica’s 1938 rebellion and the Brixton riots of 1981. It was Hall’s belief that the British had never fully come to terms with colonialism and decolonization. \nDog Soldiers\nRobert Stone\nDog Soldiers deals with the fall of the counterculture in America\, the rise of mass cynicism and the end of the optimism of the 1960s. California has moved on from the Summer of Love to post-Manson paranoia. Converse\, a once-promising writer now unable to do more than observe\, waits for artistic inspiration as a correspondent in Vietnam. Symbolic of his moral corruption is his decision to traffic in heroin\, which the 1960s counterculture never embraced as they did marijuana and LSD. \nWhite Teeth\nZadie Smith\nThis may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless\, globalized\, intermarried\, post-colonial age\, populated by “children with first and last names on a direct collision course.” Published when Smith was just 24\, White Teeth follows the friendship of two Londoners\, a pub-going working-class bloke named Archie and a Muslim from Bangladesh named Samad. Archie marries a Jamaican; Samad has twin sons\, one of whom becomes a religious militant\, the other a rabid Anglophile. The overlapping fates of Smith’s characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern\, White Teeth doesn’t quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them. \nThe MEP LITERATURE GROUP has been meeting to discuss literature since the first days of The Marxist Education Project following a presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on her Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and her recommendation that we take up literature with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of The Dead. The group has recently completed readings of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years following by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Our second summer of noir\, considered works by Hammett\, Chandler\, Manchette\, and others. Other studies have included novels related to World War I\, the global depression of the 1930s\, and novels on border politics\, migrations and labor organizing.
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/globalization-and-writing/2019-03-07/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/GlobalizedLitJan24_Site2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190309T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190309T140000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190111T053528Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190415T140647Z
UID:10006500-1552129200-1552140000@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Capital\, Volume 1
DESCRIPTION:CLASS & DISCUSSION with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP\nKarl 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. In this way\, Capital offers the reader a methodology for doing our own analysis of current developments. We will conclude Volume One this term and begin our first 12-week session on Volume Two on Saturday\, April 27. \nThe CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP has been meeting on Saturdays for two years. We are a diverse group of students\, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Newcomers are encouraged to join when your schedule permits. \nNo one turned away for inability to pay
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/capital-volume-1-2/2019-03-09/
LOCATION:United States
CATEGORIES:Classes/Events
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/CapitalAccumulationSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Halifax:20190309T153000
DTEND;TZID=America/Halifax:20190309T173000
DTSTAMP:20260405T020333
CREATED:20190204T021848Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190205T031932Z
UID:10006520-1552145400-1552152600@marxedproject.org
SUMMARY:Premonitions
DESCRIPTION:Selected Essays on the Culture of Revolt\nAn afternoon talk and discussion with author AK Thompson\n \nBringing together a decade of AK Thompson’s essays on the culture of revolt\, Premonitions offers an engaged assessment of contemporary radical politics. Inspired by Walter Benjamin and addressing themes ranging from violence and representation to Romanticism and death\, Thompson combines scholarship and grassroots grit to disabuse readers—and rebels—of cherished certainties. Whether uncovering the unrealized promise buried in mainstream cultural offerings or tracing our course toward the inevitable moment of reckoning ahead\, the essays in Premonitions are both practical investigations and prescient provocations. \nAccording to Thompson\, Premonitions are similar to Walter Benjamin’s “illuminations’ and “reflections” in that\, as forms of extrapolative reasoning\, they reveal how a thing or event can be made to alert us to the broader social process from which it derives. The major difference is that\, whereas Benjamin’s concepts placed emphasis on the resolution of accumulated tensions\, “premonitions” direct our attention toward the future that will obtain should present dynamics be left undisturbed. \nBecause of his misgivings with “progress\,” which Benjamin took to be both a central conceit of capitalist culture and an idea that had blunted class hatred among social democrats\, Benjamin urged movements to turn their back on the future and focus more on “the image of enslaved ancestors … than that of happy grandchildren.” Even so\, his work discloses a strong premonitory orientation. The concluding line to Paris\, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935)\, for instance\, recounts how “in the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.” \n“A pleasure. “This incendiary little book is also a finely balanced one. It asks the defining questions of our hard moment and shows why the answers are uneasy  ones. One part an elegiac history of recent freedom movements and their quandaries\, one part a caution against any too-easy commitment to nonviolence\, Premonitions teems with insights.”\n— David Roediger\, author of Class\, Race\, and Marxism \n AK Thompson is an activist\, author\, and social theorist. Currently a professor of social movements and social change at Ithaca College\, his publications include Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (2006)\, Black Bloc\, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent (2010)\, Spontaneous Combustion: The Eros Effect and Global Revolution (2017) and co-edited Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (2016). Between 2005 and 2012\, he served on the Editorial Committee of Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action. \ntickets are sliding scale\nno one is turned away for inability to pay \n  \n 
URL:https://marxedproject.org/event/premonitions/
LOCATION:New Perspectives Theatre\, 456-458 West 37th Street\, New York\, NY\, United States
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://marxedproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/DirectActionNetworkSite.jpg
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR